


I Wish I was The Moon

by awritingrose



Series: I Wish I Was The Moon-verse [1]
Category: Video Blogging RPF, Who Killed Markiplier, markiplier - Fandom
Genre: Content Warnings in Chapter Notes, Death, Other, Who Killed Markiplier?, absolutely no one here has a Good Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-07-28 16:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16245239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awritingrose/pseuds/awritingrose
Summary: She does not remember much of her childhood in the mansion. She was raised there, nearly, a Tess Smith amongst a plethora of Barnums, slyly snuck into family photographs at first and then steadily becoming a fixture as the years spanned across the walls.She does not remember, of course, the strangeness of the house. How William assured her that “it happens sometimes” the first time she’d stepped through one doorway and emerged in another. How she’d once wished to be alone and found a room she’d never seen before, isolated and filled with toys. How there was always somethingelsebehind Mrs. Barnum’s voice when she’d plait Tess’s hair before bed and ask if she and William had done anything exciting during the day, genuine concern masked with a veil of motherly curiosity.And when she is ten years old, Tess does not know that the arrival of William’s cousin Mark both saves and damns her.(Covers pre-WKM, WKM, and a little post-WKM, so not just a kidfic!)





	1. This Ole House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This ole house once rang with laughter/This ole house heard many shouts/Now he trembles in the darkness/When the lightning walks about” This Ole House, Stuart Hamblen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi my name's Rose and I read too much Gothic Horror in high school and now here I am. I wrote most of this in an insomnia-fueled mad sprint. It’s _mostly_ canon-compliant, with the exception of how long the cast has known our intrepid DA, and barring Mark dropping some new lore over the next 6 weeks. It’s approximately 25% historically accurate, by which I mean WW1 happens, women and minorities have rights, and we all pretend like I didn’t fudge the law school process. Also, bear with me, this first chapter covers an absolutely _massive_ time span (about 20 years); this and the last chapter will be the only ones to be this jumpy.
> 
> Warnings: brief graphic depiction of an abusive relationship [skip the section that begins with “It is at one of Mark’s parties that Tess meets Julian.”, though the fallout/trauma of this relationship persists throughout the fic], unreality + paranoia throughout the entire fic

She does not remember much of her childhood in the mansion. She was raised there, nearly, a Tess Smith amongst a plethora of Barnums, slyly snuck into family photographs at first and then steadily becoming a fixture as the years spanned across the walls. She’d befriended William first at school--or perhaps _he’d_ befriended _her_ , it was never quite clear--and her mother (single, a child herself, trying her best but nothing was ever enough) was more than willing to let Tess travel to the Barnum estate for sleepovers and birthday parties and playdates, to let her daughter have--

“A patron,” Mrs. Barnum had told Tess once, when they’d invited her to learn ballet with William.

Tess took to it like a fish to water, devoted herself to dance, spent hours learning how to throw her body through the air and how to spin without becoming dizzy. William...knew the steps as well as she did, but much preferred to find his own rhythm. Soon, the ballet instructor only came to the manor for Tess, though her mother never needed to know that. She learned society dances with William to turn her under his arm and Mr. Barnum to lift her. And for a time, they were children content to dance to his parents’ gramophone and run barefoot through the grounds. William created elaborate stories and Tess was always willing to act them out with him.

She does not remember, of course, the strangeness of the house. How William assured her that “it happens sometimes” the first time she’d stepped through one doorway and emerged in another. How she’d once wished to be alone and found a room she’d never seen before, isolated and filled with toys. How there was always something _else_ in Mrs. Barnum’s voice when she’d plait Tess’s hair before bed and ask if she and William had done anything exciting during the day, genuine concern behind motherly curiosity.

And when she is ten years old, Tess does not know that the arrival of William’s cousin Mark both saves and damns her.

***

  
As much as she is part of the family, she’s still never made aware as to why exactly Mark moves in with his aunt and uncle. _He_ doesn’t even tell her, not when they’re children and not when they’re grown. But one day he moves into a bedroom near hers, and he does not move back out.

She does not visit for a week, under the pretense of giving Mark time to settle in before he is confronted with the force of nature that is herself and William--at least, according to Mrs. Barnum. Tess sees the boys at school, but for the first time, she is not the first person William runs to. It is what she’s always feared: that one day he would make a friend of his own social class and she would be left behind, nothing but a fading memory.

But in exactly seven days she returns to the manor, and gains a new brother in Mark. He is more withdrawn than William, though the sun itself is more withdrawn than William, and Mark fits neatly into their games of make-believe. He takes William’s place as Tess’s dance partner, elegantly turning her across the ballroom floor and supporting her through lifts and jumps in her ballet practices. They are a pair, and William is more than happy to let them take center stage, as it frees him to do as he pleases without the feeling of a dozen eyes on him.

Yet Tess has a strange, heightened sense of empathy, and she knows something never sits properly on Mark’s shoulders. For a long time, she thinks it is just the weight of being fostered. She does not see the questions in Mark’s eyes when she opens a door for him and they step through to a room that should not be there, when she and William appear and disappear. She no longer notices when she does these things herself.

It is the manor itself that clings to Mark like the hands of a corpse.

***

  
When they are fourteen, they meet the twins: Damien and Celine. They are the children of a local politician, wealthy like William and Mark, and even though she is wearing the latest fashions at a society gala when they meet, Tess feels out of place again. These are more rich friends, more people who belong at these sort of events, and most importantly, this is a _girl_ of the right social class. The difference between Tess and girls born to wealth is never more obvious to her than when she stands beside of Celine. She is replacable.

The idea crawls into her head like a snake, tightening around her thoughts until she can feel nothing else but fear and anger. She spends more and more time at the manor, desperate to try to keep the attention of her “brothers”, but Damien and Celine are over just as often. When the sun sets, though, they go home while Tess returns to a bedroom that has been hers since she was six.

Her mother does not protest. She works nights more and more often, and days as well, because the economy is not stable, and she foolishly believes Tess is safe in the manor.

Her mother never wanted her, Tess realizes during this period. She was a mistake, and her mother has spent the last eight years trying to pawn her off onto another family; if she cared, she would spend more time with Tess, would be home more often, would protest when Tess doesn’t leave the manor for a week. No, the Barnums are not patrons, but scapegoats.

And they don’t want her either, not truly. Wasn’t it obvious in the way that they’d brought Mark into their home? They were trying to give William friends he deserved, friends not like Tess, friends who would not be servants when they were grown. They’d pitied her for eight years, let her play pretend and imagine she was loved, but now it is time for Tess to _grow up_. They have no use for a charity case anymore.

She packs a bag of the fancy clothes Mrs. Barnum has had made for her and as much of the silverware as she can carry. If no one wants her, then she will make her own way.

Tess makes it three miles off the property before the Barnums’ elderly beagle is nipping at her heels and William is not far behind. He is _worried_ when he sees her, worried enough to send a shock through her. He bundles her up into his arms, wraps her in his coat, and sits her on a mossy log while she sobs and tells him what she feels.

“That’s ridiculous!” He says, and she remembers _that_ , the words and the weight of his arms around her as he nearly crushes her in a hug. “We love you because you’re _you_ , not for some...nefarious purpose. And you know your mother has to work so much so you can go to school with us.”

He is right, of course, and that is all it takes to cut through the darkness: an outpouring of love miles from the manor’s walls. A pair of teenagers picking their way back through the woods in the dark of the night.

Mark lets them in through a side door and quietly helps them put back all the things Tess had grabbed. He lingers at her door after William has left.

“You should spend more time with your mom.” He does not say it unkindly, but rather with a glance at the hall around them, as if he feels something listening in. “You have a home to go to.”

He leaves her wondering what that means for years.

***

  
Tess is thrown out of the manor only twice in her life. The first time is when Celine (always fond of the paranormal, always reading her friends’ futures, always decorated in crystals) brings a spirit board into the manor. Tess is frightened of it; the parlor feels oppressive as soon as Celine unveils it, like a thousand eyes are watching them, but Celine has a beautiful smile and a kind voice. And Tess knows Celine isn’t _wrong_ when she says there’s something strange about the manor. Tess no longer notices the doorways that don’t lead where they should, no longer questions it, no longer even realizes when she’s moved across the manor, but she feels the...oddness in the air.

Mark agrees to the seance, though they are fifteen and Tess thinks Mark would leap from the bell tower if Celine asked it of him. She and Damien trade looks behind their respective siblings’ backs when they are at galas, because Mark has long abandoned being Tess’s dance partner for monopolizing Celine’s time. But Damien is as capable of a partner as Mark, and Tess does not complain so long as one of them dances with her; she is lucky to get more than one dance in with Damien, though. She wonders if _he_ sees how many of the young women around them watch him.

Damien and William think the spirit board is nonsense, and every time Celine comes up with a new niche activity, concern flickers through Damien’s eyes, too quick for his sister to see.

It doesn’t matter, regardless, who gathers around the board. Mrs. Barnum bursts through the door before any of them can touch the planchette as if she is the spirit being summoned. She snatches the board up and her fury is a match for Celine’s.

“Give it back!” Celine shouts, leaping to her feet. “We didn’t even get started, there’s so much to--”

“You are done!” Mrs. Barnum is louder, and Celine’s shoulders draw inwards. “Who’s idea was this?”

They all look at one another. Celine shakes with silent anger and Tess sees fear in Mark’s eyes and she knows what the consequences of this will be.

“It was me, Mrs. Barnum,” Tess says, her voice soft and her eyes down at the floor as she braces for the moment she’s been waiting for for five years.

Damien says her name from somewhere behind her, and even Celine looks at her in surprise, but no one contradicts her.

A confession is a confession, though it’s clear Mrs. Barnum does not believe her, and Tess is escorted from the mansion and told not to return.

***

  
She is invited back eventually, of course. It takes half a year. She studies at Damien and Celine’s house instead, though Celine is rarely home and Tess knows Damien is only there to keep her company. He is too kind by half.

It works out for the best, as relative as that is. She and Damien pour over law books at his father’s insistence, hold mock trials that Tess always seems to win. Damien’s father is not happy about it; he meant to train his son to be a lawyer, not to give a maid’s daughter fanciful ideas. Between the pair of them, they are a force to be reckoned with, and Tess finally sees a glimpse of her future. If she were a lawyer, no one could degrade her for her status. Her mother would not have to work quite so much.

When she returns to the manor, it is to Celine and Mark having made a world of their own, and William has never been happier to see her and Damien. She and Damien are the glue that holds them all together. For the first time, Tess wonders what will happen to their fellowship when they all are grown.

The time has come for them to all look to the future, to decide what they want to do. Damien, it is a given, will follow in his father’s footsteps and go into politics. Celine, rich enough to be free, wishes to travel the world. William eyes the armed forces, seeking adventure and adrenaline. Mark turns towards the glamour of Hollywood. And Tess…

Tess tells her mother she wants to go to university to become a lawyer. And her mother’s face falls.

“I’m sorry, my love, but that’s...it isn’t...it’s expensive.” She explains, reaching out for Tess even as Tess pulls away from her. “Isn’t there anything else you’d like to do?”

This time, when Tess runs, it is _to_ the manor and not away from it. Mr. and Mrs. Barnum call her mother when Tess arrives with a face red and puffy from crying, and they all sit down in the parlor.

“Mary, we’ve got more money than we know what to do with. We love Tess like our own, and neither Mark nor William plan to go to university, so--” Mr. Barnum leans across the table towards her mother. His face is split in the wide warm smile that Tess has always considered the Barnum Smile; William has it, as well.

Her mother leaps to her feet, hands balled into fists and eyes narrowed with anger. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for Tess and your friendship through these years, but I cannot let you pay for _my_ daughter’s education. If I can do nothing else for her, I will do that. I will not take your _charity_.”

 _It isn’t fair_ , Tess cries that night into her pillows in the manor, and unbeknownst to her something answers.

Why should Damien and Mark and Celine and William be able to do whatever they wanted? Why wouldn’t her mother let the Barnums pay for her school? It was _practical_ , it made sense. Why didn’t she want the best for her own daughter? She’d always used Tess as a pawn. She’d probably intended for Tess to marry into the Barnums this whole time. And now, when it is clear that that won’t happen, she’s moving on to a new target.

Well, Tess won’t be used.

She refuses to leave the manor, ignores her mother’s attempts to contact her, ignores the concern in Mrs. Barnum’s eyes, ignores even William when he nearly begs her to answer the telephone and speak to her mother.

She is allowed to throw a tantrum for three days. Then her mother appears on the doorstep of the manor and physically drags Tess back to their home.

Tess does not see Mark watching her go from an upper window.

It is time enough, once again, to break the grip of the mansion. She works hard for several years, burning her fingers in chemicals as a laundress. She repairs her relationship with her mother, realizes how loved she is and how much she does love her mother, comes to understand what exactly has gone into keeping their house and keeping them afloat, even with the help of the Barnums throughout the years.

And even as unrest grows in the world, Tess feels at peace for the first time.

***

  
William goes to war when Tess and Damien go to university; he is among the first to volunteer.

“It’ll be wonderful,” He chirps when he sees her chewing her lip with worry. “An adventure! I’ll get to see Europe! I’ll bring you back a present, I promise.”

He kisses the top of her head, Celine’s forehead, and his mother’s cheek as they see him off; he hugs Mark, Damien, and his father. They stand at the train station long after it has vanished from view.

The flu comes a year later.

His parents and Tess’s mother fall ill in quick succession. They die just as fast, the Barnums in a hospital that is overcrowded and understaffed, and Miss Smith in her bed at home with Tess holding her.

Tess is the one who writes to tell William. “If he’s going to be angry with one of us, let it be me, Mark.”

Mark and Damien try to keep her and Celine tucked away on the top floor of the manor, as if they were princesses in storybooks. But even for all of their differences, neither she nor Celine is as delicate as the boys think they are; together, they are too clever for their own good. Sneaking out is easy when neither man is home.

They only go to help. They don’t know how to be nurses, but the hospitals are so desperate for women with steady hands and kind faces that they are welcomed anyway. And, as always, it is Tess who pays the price.

They nurse her as best they can on their own, in her bedroom in the manor, keeping her fed and hydrated and trying to help her sweat out her fever. It is a wonder she does not infect them all, but they refuse to send her to a hospital; that’s where people die, Mark insists, and he is the master of the house now. If they all get sick, then they will all get sick, but he will not leave her in the hands of an incompetent doctor.

He is the one who sits by her bed the most, forcing water down her throat and spoon-feeding her chicken broth. He is the reason she fights through the delirium; he has already lost his aunt and uncle, and she does not think he could survive losing her, as well. She wonders if it wouldn’t be best for them to all be sick, to all die together.

They make her comfortable when she begins to cough up blood, though they do not stop trying to save her. Then, like a miracle, she is healthy again.

She is left with weak lungs and a tendency to lose her breath when she grows anxious or when she exerts too much energy. She becomes dizzy and light-headed when she has an episode. She is forbidden from ever dancing again.

Damien writes to tell William that she is cured, too relieved to question it. Mark, who has always had too many questions, watches her carefully for months, but nothing lurks beneath her skin. She is still the same Tess she’s always been, even as he becomes a man none of them know, and it is not clear who pays the price for Tess’s health.

***

  
When William returns from the war, it is to a family much smaller than the one he left; to engagement rings on Mark and Celine’s hands; to Damien having to help Tess stand because she is too proud to rest like the doctors told her.

Still, on the train platform, he gathers Tess and Celine into his arms. He smells of sweat and there is a tremor in his body that wasn’t there before. “And here are my favorite girls! Just who I wanted to see!”

The cheer in his voice is forced, Tess knows, and when she looks into his eyes there are bags beneath them. Around them, young men are reuniting with their families, and she wonders if they all look so hollow. He holds onto them for a moment that lasts too long, just like the kiss he places on Celine’s forehead.

He refuses to let them throw a party for his return. Instead, they all sit around and drink and listen to him tell stories. Every story has the same slightly fantastical elements as the make-believe games they would play as children, and the others know he is not telling the whole truth. But it is easier to pretend they do not see the changes in their friend than it is to try to deal with reality.

***

  
William is the best man at the wedding. Damien gives Celine away. Tess catches the bouquet.

She moves out of the manor and into Celine’s old room in Damien’s house. Mark and Celine disappear for months on a honeymoon to the tropics. William comes and goes as he pleases, always chasing the next thrill. She and Damien continue to pour over law books and devote themselves to their studies.

There simply isn’t enough time.  


***

  
Mark takes to throwing fantastic parties after he and Celine return. Tess learns to drink and misbehave with the best of them, with Hollywood actors and future senators; Damien knows where the parties are on campus, and where Damien goes, she follows.

Mark’s parties have a tendency to get out of hand. There is always at least one fight, and she assumes it is because of the temperment of actors; even Mark has been...different lately. But, Tess believes, Celine would take care of him if anything were truly wrong.

“Have you ever considered, I don’t know, calming down?” She teases one night, when she arrives late to the party and sober, just in time to rush Mark out the back door so he can vomit into the bushes (the gardener will be angry, but she’d rather face George’s wrath than that of this new butler Mark has hired).

His eyes are as hollow as William’s when he turns to look at her. “I don’t like to be alone here.”

She doesn’t know how to respond to that other than to rub circles on his back as he continues to empty his stomach.

***

  
It is at one of Mark’s parties that Tess meets Julian. She doubts that’s his real name, of course, but he is an actor, and so few of them go by the names they were given at birth that it hardly matters anymore.

“You don’t like to dance?” He asks as he leans against the wall with her, gesturing out at the raucous conglomeration of people that are possibly dancing.

He is handsome, and he is the first man that is not Mark, William, or Damien to pay attention to her--and the look in his eyes is one they’ve never given her.

“I love to. I just can’t. If I do too much, it’ll make me sick,” She explains, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“What if we go slow?” He grins, and sweeps her into his arms before she can protest, which should be her first warning, but he is a fantastic dancer, turning her in a slow waltz at odds with the music around them.

Mark gives her a thumbs-up. She catches a glimpse of Celine on the stairs, frowning down at the whole affair; when she and Julian make another round, Celine is gone, and Tess wonders if she ever saw her at all.

Julian is wonderful. Until he questions why she lives with Damien. Until he insists she come to live with him. Until he insists on choosing her clothes to make sure she’s presentable. Until he laughs when she says she wants to be a lawyer.

The first time he grabs her arm so hard it leaves bruises, she thinks it is a mistake. God knows that Mark and William have left bruises on her when they were playing. He laughs at her again when she expresses her discomfort.

When he threatens to kill her because she refuses to marry him, that is not an accident. When he squeezes her throat until she has a relapse so bad her lips turn blue, that is not an accident. Julian is wonderful, until he is not, and then he is a monster.

***

  
They hide her in the manor. When Julian comes to find her, he is met at the door by William and Celine, both of them only barely restrained from killing him on the spot. Tess does not know what they say to him (she’s hidden in the study, Mark and Damien pacing the length of the floor like caged animals), but all of her things are returned within a week and she never sees him again.

She lives with Mark and Celine for months, and that dark thing inside of her rises again: _it isn’t fair_. They are happy, and she is afraid when someone raises their voice or moves too quickly. They are perfect for one another. They are kind and sweet and in love even when their tempers clash. They were meant to be together.

 _I wish I were Celine_ , she thinks one night after too many glasses of wine. Celine has everything, and she’s never had to work for it a day in her life. She is happy and confident and in love, so bold that it makes Tess’s heart hurt. She has always taken the fall for Celine’s boldness, whether it was spirit boards or influenza, and she is left with nothing while Celine flourishes. It isn’t right. It would be so much easier if they’d never met Celine, if she weren’t around at all.

She dreams of Julian that night. They sit at a table that does not seem real in a void of darkness. He glows.

“I could make you happy like her,” He promises, and his voice echoes.

Tess scoffs. “You couldn’t. You _hurt_ me.”

His face falls, a genuine expression she isn’t used to. “I never meant to. I love you, Tess. I do. I just didn’t know how to show it. I won’t act like that again, I promise. I know what I did was wrong, and I can never tell you how sorry I am that I hurt you.”

She wants to believe him, she does, because she wants to be happy and safe, but she cannot escape how wrong this conversation is and how foreign genuine empathy is to Julian’s face.

“You just have to trust me, Tess,” He says. “Trust me, let me in, and I can make you happy just like Celine.”

The dream is distorted, his voice sounds like it’s being clipped together word by word, and she can feel her heart starting to race because everything about this is _wrong_. Her mouth is dry when she speaks again, a nearly soundless “no.”

Familiar rage distorts his features, though they twist beyond anything she’s seen, beyond anything _human_ and he lunges across the table. Ice cold fingers close around her throat again.

“Then say goodbye to your friends when you wake. It’s the last time you’ll see them,” a voice that is Julian’s and not Julian’s snarls.

She wakes herself with a scream that summons everyone else in the manor; William bursts in with a gun, Damien, Mark, and Celine behind, all of them asking if she’s okay in a cacophony indistinguishable over the high-pitched ringing in her ears.

Celine is the first to realize what’s happened. She catches Tess as Tess, in her panic, tries to flee the room, much stronger than Tess ever realized she was.

“It was a nightmare! Just a nightmare,” She insists, but there is something nameless in her eyes that undermines her words. “You’re safe.”

Tess shoves her off. “No. Damien, take me-take me home. I’m not staying here. I’m sorry, I’m not--I can’t. I need to leave.”

She spends the rest of the night staring at the ceiling of Damien’s living room. When the sun rises, before he wakes, she leaves a note telling him where he can find her, so long as he doesn’t tell the others. She packs her bag, and runs as far as she can, all the way to a law school on the east coast.

No one follows her. It is, as the thing wearing Julian’s face threatened, the last time she sees her friends as they truly are.

***

  
Damien writes her with regularity throughout the years, even though she only ever sends a sentence back at best. She asks him to apologize to Celine for her, once she’s gotten her head settled back on her shoulders, though she never says what she’s apologizing for. Celine sends an “I love you” in a postscript on one of Damien’s letters. William is furious that she’s gone, even angrier that Damien was the one who “lost” her, but he calms down once Damien shows him a letter she wrote to assure him that she is alright. Mark is the only one who doesn’t respond to her absence, and Damien calls it denial. Tess, on the other hand, cannot help but remember all of the times that Mark watched her with envy as she left the manor to go home.

She intends to go back, one day, when she’s ready and when she understands what happened that night.

She returns far sooner than she’d wanted when Damien sends one desperate, concise telegraph:

“Something terrible. Mrk, Wlm, C. Come home.”

She half expects him to meet her at the train station with caskets and funeral programs. Instead, he helps her onto the platform and carries her bags out to his car, shoulders tight with anger and concern as he explains.

“William and Celine--I’ll never know what possessed either of them to act like this, but...I can’t worry about them now. Mark is devastated. He won’t speak to any of us. I can understand _them_ , but he won’t even answer the door for me!” Damien’s hands tighten around the steering wheel as they start down the road the manor. “I’m sorry to bring you out here like this, but I’m afraid he’s going to do something stupid if he hasn’t already, and I pray that he’ll listen to you.”

“Where are William and Celine?” She asks, her voice devoid of emotion. This is too much at once. She’s spent too long learning about the worst things humans are capable of to not know how to compartmentalize her emotions. She wraps everything up into a bow and tucks it away.

Damien sighs. “I don’t know. Celine wouldn’t tell me where she was going when she left. William...I believe he’s somewhere in Africa? I just don’t understand any of this.”

Tess doesn’t, either. Damien is so much the same as she remembers, but none of what he’s telling her is _right_. Celine is not the type of woman to cheat. William is not the type of man to fool around with his brother’s wife. And Mark--

Mark does not answer the door. Rather, the chef does, and she supposes he’s meant to seem intimidating when he tells her that Mark isn’t accepting visitors and that no one’s allowed in. In the inelegant way of a girl raised with William and Celine, Tess descriptively tells him where he can store his ladle, and storms back to Damien’s car.

The second time, it is the butler who answers, telling her that Mark is out of the _country_ , that he’ll be back in a week, that she can try again then.

The third time, it is the butler again, but she accepts no excuses and shoves her way into the foyer, yelling Mark’s name.

He appears at the top of the stairs, disheveled and wrapped in a robe stained with what she hopes is wine.

“Thank God! I’ve been trying to get to you for ages. Damien and I are worried, Mark, he summoned me all the way from the other side of the country because you’ve locked yourself up here--”

“Go away.”

His voice is nothing more than a low growl. It stops Tess where she stands. It is _wrong_ and she is suddenly aware of the manor resting on her shoulders. It feels too much like eyes, like when she’d spent a year looking over her shoulder for fear of having been followed.

“No. You need help. I’m not leaving until I know you’re alright.” Still, she holds her ground. The discomfort of the manor is almost familiar, and she has survived this long feeling a breath down her neck at every turn.

He scoffs at her, theatrically throwing his arms out. “I’m alive, aren’t I? What more do you want from me?”

“To know you’re _okay_!”

“I’d be better if you weren’t here!” He shouts. It makes her shoulders draw up, but if he recognizes what he’s done, there is no acknowledgement. “Was I not clear enough when I said no visitors? Or do you think that doesn’t apply to you? What are you _really_ here for, hm? A place to sleep? More money? Why don’t you go and beg for dear _Damien’s_ charity?”

She slams the door behind her as hard as she can when she leaves. She holds herself together until Damien drops her off at her own house, and then she sobs against the door. It is the second time she is thrown out of the manor.

She does not return for two years.

***

  
William and Celine appear periodically, though never at the same time, and always at Damien’s house. William is happier to see Tess than Celine is, and he repeatedly dodges her when Tess tries to admonish him for what he’s done. He won’t apologize. He won’t even _listen_ to her, always talking about his most recent adventure.

She begins to wonder exactly how much of him the war took.

Celine is not much better; she appears for weeks at a time to retrieve funds, and then she is gone again. But Tess manages to corner her once, to ask her what on earth drove her to cheat.

“I wasn’t happy, Tess,” she says, and for a moment there is a flash of desperation in her eyes. “You of all people should understand that. I regret it, but I’d do it again. I had to get away from there.”

Tess doesn’t know how to respond to that because Celine has always had a way of winding the people who love her around her little finger, and Tess is no exception. She’s in no position to judge Celine for running, either; it’s what she’s done every single time something in her life has gone wrong.

Only she and Damien are constant, in the end.

He helps her run for the position of district attorney; she doesn’t think she’d have been elected if it were not for his backing, but the people love their mayor, and they love her in turn.

He lifts her and spins her around his office when the votes are tallied, both of them laughing like mad.

“We’re going to do great things together,” he promises.

***

  
And then an invitation slips beneath her door in the dead of night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> follow me @rose-writes-things on tumblr for fun one-shots later on, related posts, a grown woman crying when Mark inevitably drops some new lore and I have to adapt to it, and me drop-kicking my word processor when it tells me to use fewer adverbs.


	2. With Silence and Tears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If I should meet thee/After long years/How should I greet thee?--/With silence and tears” When We Two Parted, Lord Byron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The real chapter 1 of WKM: butt jokes, a dick on the body outline, humor. Me: I made a commitment to this pseudo-Gothic aesthetic and I'm going to die with it. For anyone who cares, [Here](https://image.glamourdaze.com/2015/09/Three-Evening-Frocks-Margaret-Livingston-1926.jpg) is Tess’s party dress (on the far right), and [here](https://hips.hearstapps.com/ell.h-cdn.co/assets/16/29/1280x4018/1925-bloomers-rexfeatures_3837114a_1.jpg?resize=*:2262) is what she spends the rest of the story in!  
>  **Warnings:** unreality, paranoia, disordered thinking consistent with symptoms of PTSD and anxiety

She is nearly late to the party, and drives like a madwoman to get there in time; there is still a lot of unpacking left to do as she moves into her new office, and it is so easy to lose track of time while organizing her things.

She’d wanted her return to the manor to be a bit more triumphant, a bit more vindicated, and perhaps with an apology from Mark for what he’d said to her the last time they’d met. But the knowledge that he’s _alive_ is wonderful, and Tess will take any chance she gets to humble him, even if it’s just at a cards table with the two of them fighting over who has the better poker face (Damien chews his bottom lip when he has a good hand, and William is...out of the picture). So a game night with two of her favorite boys will be more than enough, she thinks, as she nearly leaps from her car and runs up the walkway barefoot.

Her heels were meant to be cute more than practical, and Tess has long since learned not to try to drive with them on. They fall from her hands with a horrible clatter as she spots a lone figure on the doorstep.

William turns to look at the noise, and his face lights up at the sight of her. Heedless of the layers of crinoline under her dress, heedless of the taffeta, Tess throws herself into his arms. He is as strong as she remembers and lifts her clean off her feet to twirl her around, his grip around her waist almost crushing but such a welcome change from the constrained way she and Damien have to interact for fear of starting a rumor. William has never cared for propriety.

She’s laughing when he puts her down, nearly breathless. A crease forms between his brows and she knows he’s waiting to make sure she isn’t going to start wheezing or coughing.

She takes a few over-exaggeratedly deep breaths before speaking. “What are you doing here, Will?”

“Playing poker, I assume!” He pulls an envelope from his coat, identical to the one in her handbag. “You know, most people these days call me the Colonel; you’re welcome to do so, as well.”

Tess sticks her tongue out. “I’ve never _once_ called you that, and I’m not going to start now.”

She doesn’t bother to ask what he’s wearing. That became pointless a long time ago; he wears whatever he wants whenever he wants, even in the dry, lingering heat of a California October. She envies his freedom just as much as she wishes he were capable of reining himself in. The pith helmet, at least, is slightly too big--enough for Tess, in the way of all little sisters, to knock it down over his glasses.

He helps her balance to put her shoes on. Tess doesn’t ask where he’s been. She’s good at sorting through what parts of his stories are true and which aren’t, but more often than not, she simply doesn’t want to know what he’s been up to. It is easier to pretend that things are the way they’ve always been than it is to admit that he’s changed. Especially standing together like this, outside of the manor, just like it should be.

William’s presence is a miracle, and the invitation in his hand is nothing short of an act of God. It is a step, she hopes, towards forgiveness. Towards her family being made whole again.

The door opens before they can touch it. Benjamin peers expectantly around it, as if he’s been waiting for them to move. Even seeing the butler, as prim and proper as he is, is a welcome relief. Mark has not been alone all this time. He’s had company.

The foyer is spotless; everything looks perfectly modern, slightly different from how she remembers it, but not at all the dilapidated wreck she’d feared. This was the house of a man who had gotten his life together again, who still had someone who cared about him.

“Welcome back, Miss Tess, Colonel,” Benjamin nods to them in turn and holds his hands out for their invitations--as if he doesn’t know them. His mouth tenses when Tess snickers. “Please, enjoy your evening.”

Not for the first time, she is glad her mother worked so hard to give her choices; she’d never have made it as a servant. Or, at least, not as serious of one as Benjamin.

The sense of coming home washes over her the moment she steps across the threshold. William is at her side one moment and gone the next, and it nearly stirs some long-buried memory. The manor does not feel quite so heavy as she remembers, but there is still a strangeness that settles on her shoulders, something odd that she can almost taste in the air. It is a familiar strangeness, one she’s lived with too long to question, and she is too swept up in the excitement of what tonight means to pay the atmosphere the attention it deserves.

She heads to Damien as soon as she spots him speaking with a man she doesn’t recognize.

“There you are!” Damien calls, gesturing her over with one arm. “I was afraid you were going to miss it! Tess Smith, may I introduce Abraham--”

“Just Abe,” The other man cuts him off. He gives Tess a curt nod, though he doesn’t move to shake her hand. “Good to meet you. You’re the new attorney, right?”

She glances him up and down, takes in everything from his hat to his shoes, and smiles. “I am. And you _must_ be a detective.”

That, at least, gets a real grin from Abe. “You’re good. Excuse me, you two.”

Damien can only shrug when she lifts a brow, eyes darting between his face and where Abe had previously stood. “I didn’t write the guest list. You’ll have to ask Mark, when he makes his appearance.”

“ _William’s_ here!” She can’t contain her excitement, and a reflection of it dances across Damien’s face, turning his mouth up into a smile. “This is _good_ , Damien. Tonight’s going to change everything. I can feel it.”

She’s right, of course, but for all the wrong reasons.

“Really? That’s-that’s wonderful! I’m going to see if I can find him. I’ll be back shortly.” He pats her shoulder as he brushes past her, peering around the corners to try to find William.

Tess wants to yell that he won’t have any issue _seeing_ him, but bites her tongue; better not to ruin the surprise. Damien has always had a harder time rolling with William’s eccentricities than she has.

She wanders the first floor, reacquainting herself with the layout. The manor itself hasn’t changed, but the decorations have. So little is left of the Barnums. She remembers the walls that used to be covered in family portraits, but she can’t seem to find a single one. In fact, there are no real pictures in the house at all, only abstract landscapes or paintings of people she doesn’t know. Even the furniture is different. Everything is new and modern and sleek, almost impersonal, but she pushes that thought away. The manor has been Mark’s ever since Mr. and Mrs. Barnum passed. It’s only right that he would decorate it as he wanted.

(But it isn’t even the same as the last time she was here, before she ran away; even things from five years earlier have been replaced.)

“Hey! You know the rules, keep out of the kitchen!” The Chef’s voice snaps her from her reverie as she runs her fingers across the back of a chair in the dining room. “Shit, thought I was free of you.”

He brandishes the ladle as he always has, ever since she was a child; if it were anyone else pointing it at her or raising their voice, she’d have been panicked. She knows Chef, though. Scary, loud, but ultimately harmless, and strangely reassuring for it. Though reassurance came with age--she’d always been convinced, as a child, that he would absolutely follow through on his threats to bake her into a pie whenever he’d catch her stealing treats from the pantry.

Tess grins mischievously and scuffs her shoes against the floor. “Aw, come on, Chef, you know I’m not that easy to get rid of! What’s for dinner tonight?”

She tries to peer past him into the kitchen, but he shifts to block her vision. The ladle comes up again, an inch from her face. “Stay _out_ of my kitchen.”

“There’s no need to be rude to our guests!” Benjamin interrupts before Tess can think of something smart to respond back with or even make a run for the kitchen. Chef gives her one last lingering glare before slamming the door in her face, and Tess drifts over towards Benjamin with a sigh.

She can’t remember the last time she was this happy--nearly giddy--in the manor. Her nightmares seem a thing of the distant past. Maybe this is all she needed, replacing the bad memories with the good.

“I’m terribly sorry about that. He hasn’t changed at all.” Benjamin rolls his eyes, and Tess wants to comment that he hasn’t either, but that seems overly hostile. “Your drink, miss.”

She’s never liked champagne, but she takes the glass anyway. It fizzes uncomfortably when she takes a sip and forces a smile. He smiles as well, and for the first time she sees a softness to his face, something warm and welcoming, and tension she didn’t know she was holding ebbs out of her shoulders.

Damien and William turn the corner (coming from...yes, the parlor, she remembers that much), Damien patting William’s shoulder. Something is wrong, and it takes her a moment to realize what: he leans entirely too much on his cane.

He’s carried it for the past few months. But she has never seen him _use_ it, not properly; she’s always assumed that it is a status symbol, an accessory like the pocketwatch he always carries. Even as often as they walk together, she’s never seen him truly put weight on it.

Damien is a decent enough liar when he has time to think. Tess knows this about him. When their eyes meet across the room, though, he knows he’s been caught, and she watches the brief moment of panic flicker across his face. He’s lucky Benjamin is between them.

_Why has she never seen him use the cane?_

She doesn’t get a chance to find out. The grand staircase creaks on the top step as it always has, making them all look up.

Tess nearly cheers as Mark descends, each step careful and measured, wrapped in the same silk robe he’d worn the last time she’d seen him. But the robe is clean now, his dark hair is styled in the devil-may-care fluff he’s always been partial to, and he physically looks better than she’s ever seen him. Even if his laid-back smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes, which is something she has no business thinking.

Benjamin steps forward to offer a drink to him, and Damien and William move in closer to Tess, so they’re all standing in a line. She can barely see Abe on the other side of William’s ridiculous outfit.

“Welcome, everyone,” Mark says, as if there are more than five people there. “Thank you all for joining me on this auspicious evening. It’s so good to be surrounded by such close and trusted friends.”

Damien, beside of her, raises his glass a fraction of an inch. The hairs on the back of Tess’s neck stand on end. Chef must be somewhere behind them, though she doesn’t turn to look; she’s long since stopped caving every time her hypervigilance screams at her that someone is sneaking up behind her. Nine times out of ten it’s nothing but the wind.

_But the tenth time--_

She curls her fingers tighter around her glass and tries to focus on the sound of Mark’s voice, to ground herself back in reality.

“Tonight is not all about the poker, it’s not all about me!” He takes a few steps closer. His eyes fall directly on her, piercing in a way they never have been before. “It’s about you.”

He is speaking to the room, not just to her, he is speaking to the room. There is no one creeping up behind her. It is her mind playing tricks on her. There is no reason to be breathing as quickly as she is. These things are logical.

“So, drink up, be merry! Life is for the living!” Mark is on the bottom stair now, taking a glass from Benjamin’s tray.

A shudder passes through her and for a moment Tess feels faint. Damien’s hand is immediately in the center of her spine, though he doesn’t look at her. It is enough contact to ground her, to support her should she faint, but not enough to make her head stop spinning and her mind stop screaming at her to run. She is just remembering her nightmares. She is just remembering Julian. Nothing is wrong. There’s just bad memories coming to the surface.

“After all, who knows? I could be dead tomorrow!” Mark laughs. The others laugh.

Tess does not laugh. Instead, she throws back her champagne glass as quickly as she can. Alcohol will soothe her nerves, she is sure of it.

***

She remembers the night in bits and pieces.

When she is still sober, she and Damien lean against the bar while Benjamin mixes something stronger than champagne.

“How long?” She asks, not even bothering to clarify.

He sighs heavily. “A few months. A young… _entrepreneur_ mistook me for someone who owed him money. It was worse than the doctors initially believed, but I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”

She remembers. He’d told her he’d fallen. That it was nothing to worry about. A sprained ankle. Some bruises. He’d be well again in a week.

She also remembers his penchant for cards when they were in school, and the way he seems to forget his wallet more and more often when they go out to eat together.

The sting of Damien lying to her is beaten out by her concern for his well-being. She is angry, but there will always be time to be angry. Besides, one lie in all their years of friendship? That is nothing, when it comes down to it.

“Just...promise me you’ll take care of it? Do what the doctors tell you,” she says. There is more she wants to ask, more she wants to know, but the voice in her head that always stops her from asking William what he’s been up to stops her from saying anything else.

Sometimes it is better to not know.

He never turns the full force of his politician’s smile on her; a genuine one is far more effective. “I promise, I am doing my best. I don’t want to have to rely on this thing forever.”

Their drinks are ready. Benjamin, at first, hesitates to give her the same thing he gives to Damien, and she can understand why; while Damien, William, and Mark all have similar builds, she is nearly a foot shorter and sixty pounds lighter. But she spent most of her youth trying to prove that she could keep up with at least Damien, and Benjamin gives up on trying to mix her something lighter when she agrees to a mixed drink--she and William have always preferred them anyway.

She is feeling the buzz when she and Mark are finally able to have a conversation at the poker table, while the others mingle and get fresh drinks.

“I’m proud of you, you know,” she says softly.

There is a tension in the corners of his eyes that is at odds with the inquisitive way he tilts his head. “What do you mean?”

Tess gestures vaguely towards William, regaling Damien and Abe with one story or another while Abe frantically looks for a way to escape the conversation. “You being the bigger man, inviting him here. I was worried that you were just...cooped up here brooding, but instead you’re doing this!”

She is, perhaps, a bit drunker than she thinks she is. She is not so drunk that she doesn’t see something nameless flare in his eyes; she is not so drunk that she does not notice that the hand he lays over hers is entirely too cold for how warm the room is.

She _is_ too drunk to see that when Mark smiles at her, it is an act. “As I said, tonight’s not about me. I couldn’t imagine this without having _all_ of you here.”

From there, it is a blur.

They abandon poker, at some point, as the alcohol flows more and more freely. Someone puts on music and she whirls about the room by herself until Damien catches her arm and gives her a stern look. She is already short of breath, and she knows she is a few moments from working herself into a relapse, but she doesn’t want to stop.

It is Benjamin who stops her when she starts to unbutton her overdress; she is too hot. She wants to tell him that these are her best friends, she lost her sense of modesty two decades ago, they’ve all seen her in her undergarments. What comes out, instead, is a vulgar hand gesture.

The hairs on the back of her neck steadily rise again as the night goes on and she passes from being pleasantly drunk to the point where the alcohol only serves to make her paranoia worse.

Someone is watching her. She can’t breathe. Someone is watching her, has followed her here, she remembers every nightmare she ever had in the manor and the awful darkness and Julian’s distorted face. They are waiting to pounce and she just--she needs _air_. She has to get outside. There is a door to the backyard here somewhere, there has always been a door to the patio here, but she can’t-she can’t find it. Wasn’t there a door here? Had she imagined it? Hadn't she seen William and Mark go out of it only a few moments ago?

She has to turn around. She has to see who’s watching her. She can defend herself. This is the tenth time, the time there is really something creeping up behind her.

Maybe it is coincidence that Tess meets Abe’s eyes first when she turns around. Maybe it was always meant to be that way.

“Hey! The fuck do you think you’re doing? I know what you’re up to!” She slurs as she marches across the room to him. There are two too few people. She won’t be safe until this is over. “Stop fuckin’--stop fuckin’ staring at me!”

“What?! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” He shouts back.

She throws the first punch, but that is not the one Damien sees, and that is not the one that’s remembered. Though she does throw a very good punch. Abe’s just happens to be better and it just happens to lay her out in the floor.

Then Damien is over her, haloed by the lights, saying something that she can’t understand (she knows it is her name, but it doesn’t sound like a word anymore). He is carrying her through the mansion. He pulls the sheets up over her shoulders and tucks her in too tightly for her to get out and cause more trouble.

The small clock by her bed reads 1:30 when her memory ends.

***

Tess wakes at 8:30 without a headache. She is not sore. If it weren’t for her own fractured memories, she would be none the wiser as to how drunk she was or the fact that she was nearly knocked out. Not that she’s complaining, mind; the hangover she deserves would have her begging for death. Instead, she rolls out of bed in the darkly painted room that has always been hers. She is a bit touched that Damien went through the trouble of carrying her up the stairs to put her in a familiar bed instead of just dropping her wherever was closest.

At some point in the night, either she or Damien had gotten her down to her underclothes to sleep in; she suspects she had done it, as her dress and crinoline are on opposite sides of the room and Damien would’ve at least hung them up.

The dress is not particularly restrictive, not at all like the corsets she wore when she was younger and they were in fashion, but it is still too tedious to put on and she is so tired of the weight of the crinoline. Her camisole and bloomers are modest enough.

Damien and Benjamin are chatting on the landing just outside of her room, and both fall silent when they see her. They smile, though Benjamin’s is stiffer as her offers her a glass of water.

“I hope you’ve had a good night’s rest. Seltzer, to help with any lingering effects,” he says, not giving her much of a choice but to take it.

Damien peers over Benjamin’s shoulder, mischief in his eyes. “Mine had cocaine.”

Tess sticks her tongue out, and Benjamin just sighs.

“I _am_ aware that Miss Tess has...restrictions.” He almost sounds defensive, and it warms Tess’s heart a little. She’d tried it to help her confidence, at the insistence of Mark and the cheerful boasts of the pharmacy packaging, but it had instead given her a panic attack and a nearly fatal coughing spell. “Breakfast should be ready soon, you two.”

And then the butler is gone, as quickly and as quietly as he appeared, without giving Tess the opportunity to apologize for--

She groans as she goes to lean against the railing by Damien. “I really was awful last night, wasn’t I?”

“I haven’t seen you like that since we were in university,” He replies. He does not say that he hopes she was more restrained during those long years she spent on the other side of the country, where he could not watch over her. “But I am glad to see that you’re still able to let loose...even if we don’t know what for.”

“What do you mean?”

One corner of his mouth turns down, like it always does when he’s thinking. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m...happy that we’re all together like this again, but out of the blue? And Mark still hasn’t told us what we’re celebrating.”

She expects her paranoia to spike at the implication that something is being hidden, but even it is calm in the glow of the early morning sun, in Damien’s warm presence. “Can’t we just be celebrating life?”

The smile he gives her does not reach his eyes, and she knows he will be wondering about this long after they have all gone home. He’s never known when to leave well enough alone.

“You’re right. Now’s not the time to become conspiratorial. Life is ours to choose.” He’s always said that, ever since they were in university; he nearly based his campaign on it. “I’ve got some work I need to finish up--I’ll see you at breakfast.”

He is gone before she can scold him for working during what’s supposed to be a vacation, and Tess heads down the stairs to try to sneak into the kitchen to see what’s for breakfast.

She is in the parlor door before she realizes what she’s done, though, and it makes the back of her skull hurt and her skin tingle because some part of her knows that this is not the room she should be at. Still, the parlor is warm and welcoming and bright, and she steps inside.

For a moment, all is as it should be. Then thunder crashes and she jumps and when she opens her eyes again--

Oh god. There is a body in the floor and she knows it is Mark’s but it _can’t_ be Mark’s, he can’t be dead, she just saw him last night, everything is supposed to be fine, and it wasn’t storming outside a moment ago but now she can hear the rain pounding against the house and she isn’t sure if it’s thunder or her own heartbeat in her ears because that is her brother’s corpse.

She doesn’t have time to scream before Abe is there in a fluffy robe, shouting that there has been a murder, then Benjamin, then Chef, and everytime they say “murder” there is another deafening crack of thunder and a blinding flash of lightning.

Tess forgets she is in her body until Abe grabs her arm too roughly and she snaps back in a horrible blend of old and new traumas.

“Hey, listen up!” His voice is too loud and she jerks her arm out of his grip. “That man’s dead, which means I’m in charge of this place now, and you’d better get to explaining how you came to be here upon Mark’s death!”

She’s never felt a stronger need to vomit.

“Sir, the body’s cold. He’s been dead awhile,” Benjamin says.

That’s not possible. The body wasn’t here a moment ago. She blinked and it appeared.

“We need to call the police,” Tess finally manages to speak, pushing through the tightness in her throat.

Abe reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. When he flashes his badge, more than a dozen photographs unfold as well, and it’s all Tess can do not to laugh with the pure absurdity of the moment.

“As far as you all are concerned, I _am_ the police.” He looks between the three of them and then at the row of photographs. “Those are my old partners. I don’t want to talk about them, don’t ask--alright, I’ll tell you!”

He talks too fast, in a way that reminds her of an auctioneer, constantly jumping from one topic to another. Hysterical laughter continues to bubble in her chest. though she keeps her lips tightly pressed together. None of this _matters_. Is she the only one who cares?

That doesn’t mean she wants to be Abe’s new partner, as he decides for her, despite Tess vigorously shaking her head.

“Now hand me that fingerprinting kit,” He says, gesturing at the couch behind her.

There is nothing on the couch when she turns to look. She lifts a pillow to make sure it isn’t hidden somewhere, but it _simply isn’t there_.

The body is covered and Abe is dressed when she turns back. No, that’s not right. He was in his robe a moment ago. He must have been dressed all along, and her memory is just scrambled. She must have lost track of time. She’s still in her pajamas, though. She must have just gotten confused. There’s no other option. She sinks onto the couch to try to even out her breathing.

“What the hell happened here?” Damien’s voice is a welcome relief, someone familiar. His eyes are wide, frantically looking between her and the sheet on the floor. He isn’t panicked, not truly, but she can see the fear rising in him, and there is nothing she can do to reassure him. Not this time.

“I’m so sorry, there’s been a murder.” Thunder shakes the house again at Benjamin’s words.

“Who?” Damien asks.

Tess reaches out for his hand. “It’s...it’s Mark.”

“Why? Who would do this?” He gestures towards the body with his free hand, his voice starting to crack.

He does not look at Tess. She does not look away from where the sheet covers Mark’s face. Yet her fingers tighten around Damien’s all the same, because they both know the terrible answer. Neither one will admit it. It is easier to pretend.

“I...I need to speak with the Colonel. Excuse me.” He gently pulls his hand free and hurries out of the room.

Tess forces herself to her feet. “I should go with him.”

William is unpredictable at his best. News like this? She is not the calming influence she used to be; they’ve been apart for too long, he has changed too much for that, but she is still his friend.

Abe nods. “Good. Get out there, see if you can figure out who saw him last, what happened. I’ve got more tests to run here.”

She hears him continuing to give orders to Benjamin and Chef as she leaves, but it all sounds like she’s listening from underwater. The words are muffled and she honestly doesn’t care what he’s saying. The storm is too bad to leave; she can see it as she walks by a set of windows.

None of this makes sense. But the house has always been strange. She is remembering more and more. Not that it’s helping. She can remember doors that don’t always lead where they should as much as she wants; it won’t answer any of her questions. It will only make the headache building behind her eyes worse.

Following the sound of raised voices doesn’t help, either.

She hears the end of William and Damien’s argument. Damien throws the door open and storms out before she can even touch the handle, his face softening slightly when he sees her, but the anger and hurt and confusion lingers. He only shakes his head and brushes past her.

Tess knows he means to tell her not to try to speak to William now, but she braces her shoulders and steps into the little theater all the same.

“Damien, I don’t--” William starts, though he cuts himself off when he sees her. “Ah. Good to see you’re looking well again. I suppose they’ve sent you to interrogate me, too?”

She sits down in one of the seats, diagonal from him. “No, I’m just...I’m making sure you’re alright. I know you two didn’t get along, but…”

He rolls his eyes. “Good lord, you and Damien haven’t changed a bit. You’re still just birds of a feather. And why _wouldn’t_ I be alright, hm? Mark hasn’t been my friend in years! You and I both know he stopped caring about the rest of us as soon as he got famous. We didn’t _matter_ anymore. He threw us all away.”

The words sting, mostly because she can’t _argue_ with them. Mark had been awful to her the last time they’d met. But Tess isn’t capable of letting one bad memory spoil nearly twenty years’ worth of happiness. She still remembers Mark as the man he was before; all smiles and easy-going nature. The man who risked getting influenza to sit by her bed and force her to survive. He was heartbroken the last time any of them saw him, but he was not a _bad_ person.

“You’re still family,” she says gently.

“ _Please_. He changed his name the moment he got a chance,” William scoffs. There are bags under his eyes when he looks at her, though, and a manic energy behind his dark irises. “This is probably exactly what he would want, you know. I bet he wasn’t even murdered! He probably slipped down the stairs while he was _drunk_ , and now we’re all running about pointing fingers at one another. It’s just the sort of drama he would have _loved_.”

He’s still not wrong. Mark would’ve loved a dinner theater murder mystery. He would’ve dragged them all to it.

The silence drags on too long until William speaks again. “Answer me this, Tess. Do you think _I_ killed him?”

“No!” She says.

_Yes_.

“Then go and play detective somewhere else. I want to be alone with my thoughts. I’ll be here when you’ve all come to your senses.”

It is the harshest dismissal she’s ever had from him, and even that is saying something.

***

By midday she is no closer to finding out what happened than she was when she started. Benjamin showed her a broken bottle in the wine cellar; his outpouring of grief is both disturbing and strangely humanizing, though she suspects that the bottle was only broken by someone’s drunken, slippery fingers.

Chef walked in on her in the kitchen as she stood on a barstool to reach the secret stash of cookies, just like she’d done as a child. He’d sighed and pointed her towards a perfectly serviceable plate of leftovers.

(“I don’t think you did it, by the way,” she’d said. “If you were going to snap, you’d have done it years ago.”

And then he’d laughed in a way that made her wholly regret writing him off.)

Abe informed her that Mark was killed at 1:30, made a veiled accusation against her again, and then promptly removed her from the suspect list when she’d reminded him that she’d had to be _carried_ to bed at 1:30.

She’d even managed to find a dressing gown to pull over her shoulders, and tries to ignore that it was once Celine’s. Tess is honestly just surprised that any of Celine’s things are still in the manor.

The storm has cleared by mid afternoon, and she takes advantage of the break to finally get some fresh air in the backyard.

This was where she, Mark, and William had truly spent most of their childhoods. They’d run through the gardens and the trees, up and down hills. They’d taken turns playing King or Queen of the Castle, with the wooden gazebo down the hill as their throne (not the wrought-iron one on the patio, no; that was too close to the manor, that was not a kingdom). They’d first created the golf course from a spade stolen from George’s toolbox and flags made from sticks; Mr. Barnum had hired a professional to make them a real course based upon the design once he’d seen what they’d done.

She’d run from the gazebo for three miles when she’d been fourteen and trying to run away, never once seeing another soul or property line. Now, from her vantage point on the patio, she can see glimpses of a roof in the distance as the trees sway in the wind. More reclusive celebrities have made their homes here. Still, the trees are dense, and she feels the same sense of wonder looking out over the landscape as she’d felt as a little girl, when Mr. Barnum had had to lift her onto his shoulders so she could see the world fall away around them.

The manor and its grounds are beautiful. But now, without the eyes of a child, without Wiliam and Mark and endless games of make-believe, without the ringing laughter of a loving family, it feels terribly lonely.

Tess finds Damien precisely where she expects him: pacing by the gazebo on the porch, his cane tapping rhythmically against the stones. He’d always liked the wrought-iron gazebo better than the wooden one. He’d liked to eat with she and Celine there, looking out over the world or laughing as Mark and William each did increasingly idiotic stunts to try to impress--well, to try to impress Celine.

They all really should’ve seen it coming.

Damien only stops pacing when he turns, almost bracing himself before he recognizes her and relaxes. “I’m sorry you saw that argument between the Colonel and I. I lost my temper, and it wasn’t right. He...he must be in shock.”

She only notices it now because of how strange it sounds, but Damien has called William ‘the Colonel’ this whole time. When did that start? Is she truly the only one who calls him William anymore?

“You and I both know he’s an eccentric, for better or worse,” Damien sighs. It brings a smile to Tess’s face despite the circumstances. “But he’s our friend, and...so was Mark. God, I’m so sorry, I haven’t even asked. Are you alright?”

Her instinct is to lie. But this is Damien, who has always told her the truth, and so he deserves the truth from her. “I am for now. I was...bad this morning. Now I’m just trying to think of it like it isn’t...us. Like it’s just another case, and I’m trying to look at all the evidence. I can kick and scream and grieve once I know we’re all safe.”

He nods and reaches out to gently touch her wrist, a kind reassurance. “Promise me you’ll let me know if you start to feel ill, and I’ll insist that _detective_ let me take you home.”

“I promise.” This time, she does lie, but she’s always had the better poker face. “And you? How are you holding up?”

Damien raises his cane to twist it in his hands, a nervous motion she is not used to. Normally, when he is pretending to not need the thing, he flips and twirls it as if it were a weapon, gestures with it like it’s an extension of his arm. Withdrawing from her to fidget is a sign that things are not right.

“I...I know I’m supposed to be a leader at times like this, but I…I feel lost.” His voice nearly cracks, steadily raising in volume. “Mark has been my friend all my life, and now he’s just _gone_?”

His voice borders on the volume where she begins to grow nervous and anticipate a shouting match (not just from Damien, it is an ingrained response to any sort of raised voice). Tess doesn’t control her reaction as well as she thinks, or maybe Damien is better at reading her body language than she thinks, because he takes a deep breath and a step back.

“I feel the same way,” she says, a bit too quickly. It’s true. He’s just putting voice to all the emotions she’s got latched away in a Pandora’s Box. “I don’t understand how this could happen.”

Damien shakes his head. “And I don’t have any answers for us. I just...need more time alone to think.”

She nods and turns to head back inside, pretending that the second dismissal of her day does not hurt just as much as the first. It is practical, she tells herself, to go in. The sky is growing dark again and she can’t risk being caught in the rain in her skivvies. It will drive Damien indoors as well when it starts, and then they will all be in the same building.

Everyone else wants to be alone with their thoughts. Tess, well…

_She doesn’t like to be alone here._

“Hey, over here!” Abe catches her eye and waves her over before she can go back to the door she came from. Reluctantly, she goes to him. “You’re not going to fucking believe this.”

Somehow the expletive makes her soften towards him. It’s strangely humanizing. “What’s wrong?”

“Mark’s body. It’s fucking gone.”

It feels as if he’s replaced her blood with ice water because that _doesn’t make sense_ , a body can’t just _disappear_ , and they certainly didn’t _misdiagnose_ him! She moves faster than Abe does at first, back towards the parlor doors, though it only takes him a moment to catch up and retake the lead. Her skin bristles the whole way, as if she is being watched, but she has no time to look around or to indulge her paranoia.

Sure enough, when Tess and Abe step back into the parlor, everything is as she’d left it earlier in the day. Except that the body is gone. Only the bloodstains on the floor remain. It doesn’t make _sense_.

And finally, Tess cracks the tiniest bit, and lets out the hysterical laughter that’s been growing since this whole ridiculous day began.


	3. Don't Break Character

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’ve got a lot of heart/Is this real or just a dream?/Rise up like the sun/Labor til the work is done” Be Still, The Killers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I'd rather pull my own teeth than have to write original dialogue for Abe! [Here](https://open.spotify.com/user/summerjuliet/playlist/1Usgm8SXsBhtBazKXEDMHV?si=yAZkCxOqRsiDNabuHPmOZg) is the Spotify playlist for the fic! It includes everything that the chapter titles come from and some extra songs that just fit.  
>  **Warnings** : unreality, more disordered thinking, Tess just generally is always 3 steps and 10 years of repression away from a panic attack

Abe’s hand on her waist is not invasive, only a desperate attempt to guide her to the couch while Tess is still shaking with laughter. She can see the concern in his eyes, she can feel how tense he is, but what else is she meant to do? If she cannot grieve, if she cannot cry, if there is no _body_ \--what else is there to do but laugh?

“Hey, hey, partner, listen to me!” He says, resting one hand on his knee. She can hardly hear him. “Dammit, Tess. Snap out of it.”

Abe grabs her wrist with his other hand, trying to pry it away from her face, and her laughter stops in an instant.

Tess wrenches out of his grip and glares down at him, where he kneels on the floor in front of her. Her voice is hoarse from laughing and she hardly recognizes the rage in it. “Don’t _fucking_ touch me!”

The Detective looks just as shocked at the outburst as she feels, his blue eyes open wide and both of his hands raising as if he’s being arrested. He slowly stands and takes a step away from her. “Alright, you got it. I won’t touch you. You pulled yourself back together?”

Tess closes her eyes and counts to ten, taking deep breaths. She runs her fingers over the fringe of the throw pillow behind her. She knows who she is, she knows where she is, and she knows who Abe is _not_.

When she opens her eyes again, Abe is still standing in front of her, only now his hands are tucked into his coat pockets and his expression is pleasantly neutral. She nods.

“Alright, then we’ve got work to do, partner.” He offers her a hand to help her stand, and Tess takes it with a sense of grim determination, still a bit unsteady on her feet. “ _Somebody_ here took that body. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you, so we’ve got to figure out who the hell it was.”

“What the hell is going on in here? I heard--what happened to the body?!” Benjamin storms into the room, looking between them and the empty space on the floor that still makes Tess dizzy if she stares at it for too long.

“It’s been moved,” Abe supplies, as if it weren’t readily obvious.

Benjamin thinks about it for a moment, then: “On its own?”

“No, of course not!” Abe sighs heavily and Tess starts to feel laughter in her chest again because this can’t possibly be a real conversation.

Chef is next to arrive in the comedy of errors, gesturing at the floor with his ladle. “Where’s the body?”

“It’s been moved.”

“On its own?!”

“We haven’t ruled that out yet,” Abe says, with an aside glance at Tess, and she pities him for a moment. “But let’s not forget that we’re still dealing with a murderer.”

Thunder crashes overhead and Tess realizes that the storm has returned. Damien will be coming in soon, then. Good. There are only a handful of people in the manor that are physically capable of lifting Mark’s dead weight (Abe shoots her another glare when she snickers at herself) and she needs to speak with all of them. Damien wouldn’t, he has no reason to and he’s too squeamish besides, but he might have seen something. He might have a better idea of what to do, or he might just have a hug for her, which Tess could really use.

It is William, not Damien, that appears in front of her when she blinks, making her jump off of the ground and making her skull split with pain. The hair on her arms stands up like it does when lightning strikes too close. The whole room swims for a moment with William’s face as the focal point, like the night sky turning around Polaris.

It doesn’t make sense to her, either.

“Quite a storm out there, eh?” William says by way of greeting He gives her shoulder a gentle, playful push, like they’re children again. “What are you all doing in here, huddling in fear?”

He moves away from her and turns his attentions to the others, heedlessly traipsing over the bloodstains, but thankfully taking her headache with him.

_He is dry. How could he have appeared beside of her there without coming from outside in the rain? How is he dry?_

_She’d woken from a nightmare of a terrible, formless thing when she was eight, and run for the gardener’s house because George knew everything and told her how to protect herself when he let her help in the garden, she’d thought of his shack and fled as if something was chasing her, and when she’d opened the door to the main hallway she’d stepped out of the greenhouse--_

Abe’s presence snaps her back to the moment. He doesn’t touch her, but he shifts close enough for his arm to brush against hers, which is just enough contact to ground her. She has missed part of the conversation, but comes back in time to hear Abe ask William: “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, I’m just saying I’ve got plenty of...e-experience on the matter,” William stammers out, gesturing vaguely at the floor.

Bile and butterflies swirl in Tess’s stomach. She knows what it means--she’s known all along, she and Damien both, since this hell of a day began--but it is too terrible to admit. If she can just keep this all under control for a little longer, if they can all keep ignoring the truth, she can find them another explanation. She can hold them all together, there must be another explanation, it is so much easier to pretend and Tess just wants to keep pretending. That’s what she and William have always done together.

“That just raises more questions!” Abe says, and Tess knows he’s right.

William claps her on the shoulder. There is an unfocused look in his eyes she knows all too well. She sees it in the mirror when she stares at her reflection to try and prove to herself that she is real, that she has a body, that this is not all some elaborate dream or fantasy. When the reflection inevitably makes her sick and she has to resist the urge to smash the mirror ( _it is seven years of bad luck, George told her once_ ) because a reflection is not proof enough that she is real and that can’t truly be what she looks like.

Tess is familiar with the look of someone detached from reality, and she does not like that she sees it in William.

“Well, I’m off to see if I can find the old bag of bones!” He laughs, sauntering out the door and down the hall despite Abe’s calls for him to stop.

Tess wants to chase after him, to make him breathe and look at her until he comes back to his body, to impress upon him that this is _important_ and he can’t do this _now_ , but she cannot make her legs move. She is paralyzed by the fear of what else she saw in his eyes: a lack of recognition. William, for the time being, does not know who she is.

It hurts more than she’d like to admit, and she sweeps it neatly into the corner of her mind where the rest of her emotions have been banished to. There are moments that he’s forgotten before, snatches of memory that the war took from him. But she cannot blame what he saw overseas for making him forget _her_.

“Alright, lock this place down. No one in or out until we get to the bottom of this,” Abe orders. Benjamin and Chef leave to secure the grounds. “You know how to get to Mark’s bedroom?”

She nods. The thought of being locked into the manor makes her heart start to race for a reason she can’t explain. She knows she isn’t in danger--William wouldn’t hurt her. William isn’t a murderer in the first place, but he especially would never hurt her. No, there is something else breathing down her neck. Tess hopes it is only memories.

Abe gestures for her to lead the way, and Tess makes the decision to go the long way. The whole house is a loop, but she wants time to…

“I’m sorry,” They say in unison as they pass through the foyer. Abe raises a brow and gestures for her to go first, never breaking stride.

“Last night. I accused you of some terrible things, and I wanted to apologize for that--and for punching you.” She can feel heat rising to her cheeks and she can’t seem to look him in the eye.

Abe laughs. “You throw a pretty mean punch. Keep that up, it’ll come in handy. I’m sorry for punching you, too.”

She smiles at him, for what she thinks is the first time, with genuine warmth. He was tough to warm up to at first, strange and just unfamiliar enough to make her automatically suspicious of him, and she’s certainly not going to say that he isn’t abrasive at times. But he’s not nearly as bad as she’d assumed.

“Mark was my friend, had been for years. But then he went quiet. I knew something was wrong, I just...never figured out what,” he says, after the silence lasts a beat too long. “Now I guess I never will.”

It is odd. Tess has never met Abe. It seems impossible that their paths have never crossed, that all the times she was at the manor before--but no. She’s been away for a while. That’s all it is.

_She survived the flu, and Mark became a man none of them recognized._

“His wife left him,” Tess says, curling her nails into her palm. “He didn’t speak to any of us, until yesterday. It wasn’t just you.”

Abe seems surprised, but it’s not the right kind of surprise. Tess can’t put her finger on what’s wrong about his expression. It’s almost as if he’s surprised by her reassurance, not by the news.

“I’m going to level with you here: I think this whole thing smells fishy. Like it was all just a ruse,” He continues. They’re on the second floor now, cutting through to another staircase.

She’d forgotten how many staircases there are in the manor. She can’t figure out if there are less or more than she remembers.

But Damien had said something similar earlier: that Mark had never told them what they were celebrating. That it wasn’t the time to become conspiratorial. Tess can remember how the thought didn’t panic her when it was Damien saying it, but now that she knows he was right? Her paranoia rises and she feels eyes on her skin. It will not go away until this is all resolved and she has left the manor for good. Now, though, she’s willing to let her hypervigilance stay around. If she can sense something before it inevitably blows up in her face, then she and Abe stand a chance of pulling this off.

“I feel like we’re not talking about the most important thing, though,” She says. They are nearly to Mark’s bedroom now, passing back by the parlor where the body should be. “Why would someone kill him?”

“ _And_ who stood the most to gain from his death?” Abe waves his index finger in the air, as if he’s making some revolutionary point, and it’s a strange little eccentric gesture that makes Tess warm up to him that much more.

They’re all eccentrics in the manor, really. They’re all living in their own worlds.

“In addition to being stabbed thirty-seven times, Mark was poisoned, beaten, strangled, drowned, and shot, in that order, and it sure as shit wasn’t an accident.” Abe’s voice is nearly harsh.

The world spins again and Tess grabs onto the banister tight enough to make her knuckles turn white and to make Abe reach out helplessly for her. She’ll give him points for being committed to not touching her again.

_It doesn’t make sense._

“It doesn’t make sense,” Tess repeats aloud. “That’s overkill. Just one of those would have killed him, and so many different methods?”

She’s prosecuted murderers before. They don’t mix like that. Poison, that’s usually the mark of a female killer, and she’s the only woman in the manor. Beating would have to be a man, to take Mark down. And drowning would require Mark to still be _alive_ upon hitting the water and for someone to have taken him to a water source in the first place. Shooting him, at that point, would be a mercy.

“I know. There’s not going to be a simple answer for this one, so we’re going to have to do some investigating.” Abe gestures towards the door to the master bedroom. “You sure you’re up for this?”

_No._

Tess opens the door anyway, and immediately feels as if someone has punched the air from her lungs. Abe more or less sums it up with a quiet, “well, shit.”

The manor, as a whole, is neat and orderly. Anywhere Benjamin can reach, there is not a hair out of place. She had thought--no, worse, she had _hoped_ \--that it was a reflection of Mark’s mental state. It had all seemed so perfect. But here is where the veneer cracks and she is faced with what she’d feared.

The room is in complete disarray. Furniture is overturned, broken glass litters the floor (she chooses her steps carefully, suddenly regretting her decision not to put on a pair of shoes), and there are cracks and holes in the wall that tell stories of fury and violence. She can feel the despair in the room.

They’d all left him alone. She should’ve fought harder. She should’ve kept coming back. She shouldn’t have let him drive her off with harsh words. He was never alright. He’d lied to her the whole night before, and that rips open a hole in her chest, that he had not trusted her enough in the end. It must have been because she’d left. She’d abandoned him. She’d abandoned them all.

_Oh, God, what have I done?_

There are pictures on the table by the window. He and Celine would eat breakfast here, and she could hear them laughing all the way in her room, and she had grown violently jealous of their happiness.

_None of this is fair._

The pictures are of them all. She remembers taking them. The first is the four of them: herself, Damien, William, and Mark. It is the last family photograph they took before William went to war and everything changed. They were all so happy.

The second photograph includes Celine. This was after William had returned; it was at the party they’d thrown for Tess and Damien’s graduation, if she recalled correctly. She and Damien had their arms around one another on one side, William stood firmly in the middle, and Mark and Celine were laughing at some joke they’d told one another. Tess had never noticed the unhappiness on William’s face before now. God, they should have seen it coming.

And the third--the third she does not recall, because she is not in it. It must have been after she ran away. It is only Mark and Damien, standing side by side, and the smiles on their faces are so forced that it makes her want to scream. There is no warmth in the photo. If she looks at it too long, she will cry.

_It doesn’t make sense._ The picture must have been taken after the split. She knows it instinctively. Yet Damien told her that Mark had shut them all out, and the world as well, as soon as Celine left. Something cold coils in her stomach, because there never would have been time for this picture to have been taken, not in the narrative that Damien has told her--

_What else has he told her?_

The fourth frame on the table grinds with the tell-tale sounds of broken glass when she picks it up.

“Careful,” Abe calls from across the room.

Tess is sorely tempted to stick her tongue out at him, because despite the situation, that has always been her go-to response to one of the boys actually trying to act like an older brother.

In her hands is a picture of William in his uniform. She remembers it well. It used to sit on the table in the foyer, beneath the mirror, when the Barnums were alive. It was nearly an altar to pray for his safe return. When she’d been convinced that the flu would kill her, when she began to cough up blood, she’d begged Mark to bring the photo to her room so that William could be with her in spirit.

Now the glass is shattered and the picture is warped and torn. Her voice is just as fragile when she turns to show it to Abe. “Hey.”

The picture frame blocks her view of him. When she puts it down, William is _there_ , standing between them as if he’d always been in the room.

_No. That isn’t right._

She drops the photo as another burst of pain makes her grab her head. The Detective looks concerned and the Colonel--

No. William.

_William_ seems almost angry. “On top of the case, aren’t you? Say, detective, do you mind if I borrow our friend for a moment?”

Abe makes eye contact with her. She gives him the tiniest nod. William is her best friend, her oldest friend, her brother. He wouldn’t hurt her. She has nothing to fear from him. He recognizes her again.

“Sure,” Abe says. “I’ll handle it from here, partner.”

William gestures grandly for her to walk with him, like he used to when they were pretending to be the lord and lady of some old castle.

“Let’s go for a walk like we used to, have a chat!” William exclaims, leading her out of the bedroom. The moment she steps through the door it is as if a weight has lifted from her shoulders. Something lingers in that room.

The moment they step through the door, though, William loops his arm through hers and nearly drags her out of the balcony door onto--the downstairs patio. Vertigo makes her want to vomit and her rage at being dragged by him, by _William_ of all people, has her shove him away to get her arm back.

_When did the rain stop?_

" _What_ do you think you’re doing?!” She shouts.

He raises his hands, innocently, and for a moment her William is back. “I-I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I only wanted to speak with you.”

“Then-then speak.”

The moment of clarity in his face is gone again, like a candle being snuffed out, and he is back to being the angry version of William she has never seen before.

“You and Damien are my closest friends, and there was a time when I could have said the same about Mark, but…” He clenches his fists and she watches a tremor go through his shoulders. It makes her more nervous than it should. “De mortuis, eh? Oh, Tess! The pool! Let’s take a swim!”

She looks incredulously at the water. How could he suggest swimming?

_Mark was drowned--_

When she looks back, William is in his garish bathing suit, and she is so dizzy that she has to lean against the wall behind her to make the world stop spinning. She can hardly breathe. William doesn’t notice. William always notices. He leaps into the pool without a backwards glance at her.

“Tess?” Damien turns the corner so sharply it makes her jump. “Ah, I thought I heard you. Is the Colonel with you? I need to apologize for being so short with him.”

She can only shake her head, and Damien bends to be able to look her in the eyes.

“What’s the matter? Are you having an episode? Do I need to call a doctor?” He, at least, is genuinely concerned. He hasn’t forgotten what it looks like when she’s in distress.  
William used to be her guardian. It brings tears to her eyes to think that he has truly forgotten so much. He’s slipping away from her, and there’s nothing she can do, and she feels so terribly helpless--

“I’m alright,” she lies. “I just got winded. I thought I saw someone out here, and ran to see.”

Damien frowns. “You know not to do that. You promised me you were taking care of yourself.”

“I’m trying.” That, at least, isn’t wholly a lie.

If he doesn’t believe her, he does not argue. “Alright. Well, if you see the Colonel, let me know.”

And then he is gone again and she is left alone with the strangeness that has always followed William.

He is beside of her when she turns, entirely too close, back in his clothes, and dry. This time she actually feels her breathing begin to lose its rhythm as, for a moment, she cannot breathe at all.

“Ah, life needs a bit of madness!” William exclaims, giving her a shove almost too hard to be considered playful.

“William--” She needs to get his attention. She needs to snap him out of this. It’s a manic frenzy, it must be. She’s been there.

“Tess, Tess, you and I both know that our _beloved_ host had more than his fair share of enemies lately!” He is walking backwards away from her, dangerously close to the steep staircase, and she reaches out to warn him. He pays her no heed. “I’d take a closer look at his employees, were I you! God knows he’s a tough son of a bitch to work for.”

That doesn’t make sense, either. She cannot recall a time when William ever worked for Mark.

_What more does she not know?_

William doesn’t give her a chance to ask. He turns, spots the golf course over the railing, and jumps with joy like a child. “Oh! The golf course! I’ll fetch the clubs and meet you down there!”

He sprints away, too fast for her to catch him, too fast for her to think of anything to say, too fast for her to do much other than lean, exhausted, on the stone railing. The sun is starting to set over the house. It will be dark soon. That will drive him indoors, if only because he fears the snakes that live around the course.

“Colonel?” Damien’s voice makes her whip around. He twists his hands around his cane again. “Damn. I could have sworn I heard him. No matter. Will you accompany me for a moment? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”

Tess is all too willing to walk with Damien back towards the stone table, where she sits down without much explanation. He stays standing and pacing. He is truly going stir crazy, then, and she is truly growing tired of trying to handle everyone else’s emotional breakdowns on top of her own.

“I know you’ve been helping our… _intrepid_ detective with his investigation, but I have my reservations,” he begins. “The killer must have been in the house with us last night. And while I would stake my life on the innocence of yourself or the Colonel--William…”

“You can’t say the same for Abe,” she finishes the thought for him. Damien almost looks abashed as he nods. “I trust him, if that’s worth anything to you.”

“Of course it is!” This time, he is certainly horrified that she would think so little of her own opinion, and Tess gives him a tired smile. “Then, mayhaps, in the shadows of this manor, lies hidden a murderer.”

_She remembers a face made of shadows that seethed and writhed, she remembers Julian’s face giving way to a horrible creature that is nothing but a void, she remembers a blackness so complete she felt as if it would leech the life from her, she remembers Mark and Celine both telling her, at completely different times, that they do not feel comfortable in the manor, she remembers feeling as if every step she took she was being watched, she remembers breath down her neck--_

A gunshot from inside is louder than the crack of thunder that punctuates Damien’s words. She is on her feet and running in a moment, Damien on her heels, even though she knows she shouldn’t run. She thinks of the gunshot, of the sitting room where it came from, and throws open the first door she touches. It should not lead to the sitting room and yet that is where she and Damien emerge.

William and Abe are pointing guns at one another, and that doesn’t make sense, because William was just going to play golf and he couldn’t have gotten back inside without passing her--

_She made the door open where she wanted it to. She can hardly spend time questioning what William is capable of._

“Drop your weapon, you murderer!” Abe shouts.

Tess and Damien move like a machine. She approaches behind William while Damien moves across the back of the room, circling towards Abe. They have their strengths. They know where they are the most useful.

“I bloody well won’t! You’re the one that assaulted _me_! For all I know, you could be the murderer!” William shouts back.

They are gradually backing towards the entrance, and soon, Abe will have nowhere to go. She fears what will happen when he is cornered.

“Everyone, please! I know we’re all on edge, but can’t we resolve this amicably?!” Damien raises his voice to be heard as well.

“On edge?! He tried to shoot me!” Abe snaps back.

And Tess can’t even find it in herself to doubt him.

“William, _please_ , give me the gun. Everything’s alright. You don’t have to do this.” She keeps her voice softer, lower. She is closer. She wonders if she could pull the gun from his hands before he could shoot.

She reaches out for his shoulder, only trying to snap him back to reality, to make him _see_ what he’s doing. He shakes her off without a glance.

“Enough of this horseshit! You knew I was onto you, and you were trying to kill me before I could out you as the murderer!” Abe’s back hits the wall.

“Abraham!” Tess’s voice is high, so high she hardly recognizes it, but this is dire and she has to do something, one of them _has_ to listen to her.

“I will not be called a murderer in my own home!” William’s pistol is raised too high and she doesn’t have a choice, he’s going to shoot, she has to try and grab it--

“Stop!”

The front door slams open, cutting out Celine’s silhouette in the golden haze of the sunset. The world seems to freeze. And Tess, for one, has never been happier to see the Seer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The phrase William uses, "de mortuis", is just extreme shorthand for "De mortuis nil nisi bonum"--"do not speak ill of the dead". I like how it flows better and you also can't say "the dead, eh?" in english and have it make sense.


	4. Temper, Temper, Little Lady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Better bite that tongue, it is not becoming/And maybe I’m crazy for claiming my freedom/For loving and leaving” Runaway, Ryn Weaver

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I regret everything that led me to have to short-stick Celine and Tess's relationship for the sake of "Tess is the friend Celine sold to Satan for a cornchip so they couldn't be too close".  
>  **Warnings** : manipulation, reference to an abusive relationship, major unreality, more disordered thinking, here there be Narrative Fuckery, basically everything ramps up to a solid 10, this is a Long chapter

Celine lets the door slam behind her so hard it shakes the panes of glass. Her eyes drift over each of them in turn: Abe, unfamiliar, pistol still at the ready by his side, back against a wall; William, gun loose in his fingers, slack-jawed; Tess, halfway to William’s gun, only barely restraining herself from throwing her arms around Celine; Benjamin and Chef, incredulous and in the middle of it all ( _Tess cannot recall when they arrived but they must have been there all along, she must not have noticed_ ); and Damien, confused and concerned, too far away to do anything.

“What are you doing?!” Celine demands as she storms over. Her shawl trails behind her like a cape.

She is dressed in all black. There is a veil on her hat. This is how she dresses now, Tess knows that, with black and silver and stars and lace, but it is so horribly appropriate that she wants to cry.

“Celine? What are you doing here?” William asks. He finally lowers his gun.

“‘Celine?’ How the hell do you know her?” Abe demands, now regarding Celine with no small amount of suspicion.

_How did she get on the grounds?_

“She’s our friend,” Tess says before William can respond with anything truly incriminating. He has already made a poor enough case for himself. The last thing any of them need is Abe putting the pieces together, though with the longing affection in William’s voice, it will be nearly impossible for him to not have realized.

“Madame, I’m afraid you’ve come at a very inopportune time. Something dreadful has happened.” Benjamin wrings his hands beside of her.

A crease forms between Celine’s brows. Tess is suddenly reminded of Mrs. Barnum, though Celine had never gotten on with the old lady of the house. Mrs. Barnum had a better handle on her temper than Celine did when they were younger. But now, with the years behind them, she feels similarly chastised by Celine’s gaze as she always did by Mrs. Barnum’s.

It doesn’t escape Tess’s notice that Benjamin still calls Celine “madame”. She has no claim to the manor anymore. She could just as properly be a “miss”, like he’s always called Tess. She must have made an impression--for better or worse--on him. There is a familiarity in his face that makes Tess believes it was good.

“I can see that!” Celine waves her hand to indicate Abe and William, though she pays her former lover the same amount of attention as the stranger. “I’m glad I got here before it could get any worse.”

Her focus finally falls solely on Tess. Tess had forgotten how Celine’s eyes shift with the light, from green to brown ( _how long_ has _it been since she saw Celine?_ ); here, they are as dark as William’s. Something about Celine draws her in as it always has.

“Celine, it’s Mark,” she says, unable to stop herself. “He’s dead. I’m so--”

“What?” Celine’s voice is a horrified whisper. She holds her hand over her heart.

Tess cannot recall ever seeing her cry, so the shocked shine in Celine’s eyes is enough to kill the words in Tess’s throat before she can speak. Celine simply doesn’t _cry_.

_But she remembers fever on her skin and the smell of blood and mucus and a woman’s sobs echoing around her, and she knows they are not Mrs. Barnum’s because the funeral was a month ago, but she and Celine are the only women in the manor now and she is the one dying--_

“It was murder,” Damien says, and thunder crashes overhead. This time, there is no rain to accompany it. “And worse yet, the body is missing.”

Something sweeps across Celine’s face, a rush of emotions that Tess cannot name, and then the Seer sets her jaw. Gone is the vulnerability on her sharp features, gone is the shine in her piercing eyes. It is all replaced by the aristocrat’s mask that Celine learned to wear when they were teenagers. There is nothing left but grim determination and _this_ is the woman that Tess knows, the woman who did not flinch at her own parents’ funerals.

“Show me,” Celine orders. Her eyes only barely leave Tess’s to acknowledge her brother. “And _don’t_ say that word!”

“What word, murder?” Chef says, careless.

The thunder is louder this time, and Tess flinches. When she opens her eyes again ( _it was only a second_ ), they are all standing in the parlor where Mark’s body should have been, and for a moment Tess cannot keep her balance. She blindly grabs the arm of the person beside of her--judging from the way they tense and the scratchiness of the fabric under her hand, it is Abe. Hesitantly, subtly, he shifts to put the right half of his chest behind her. He is tall enough and she is small enough that she can lean back against him to hold herself up.

The only person who would notice the movement would be Damien, next to William with his back against the fireplace, but he is too busy staring at his sister with furrowed brows and the corner of his mouth pulled down to pay any mind to Tess.

_Did they not notice? Did she simply forget walking to the parlor?_

“Well, murder--” Benjamin’s words make Tess brace herself against Abe as the thunder strikes again, but they do not move, and he continues speaking without missing a beat. “--is a rather apt description of what happened--”

Celine slaps his shoulder lightly, gesturing around. “Do you not see the lightning?”

_It is the low rumble of the thunder Tess has always focused on, but there is lightning, too bright and too purple._

Her voice is raised, and slowly, her shell begins to crack. _This_ truly is the Celine that Tess remembers, unchanged from when they were fifteen, still just as quick to anger when she is disobeyed.

“Are you sayin’ it was lightning that murdered Mark?” Abe’s voice is a vibration against her back. She could stand on her own, probably, but he is wonderfully solid and she still feels as if she might float away from her body with every flash of light, no matter how tightly she has her toes dug into the floor beneath them.

William clucks his tongue. “Well, Mother Nature doesn’t strike me as having murderous intent...unless you count that time in Verdun when--”

“Stop, stop!” Celine cuts him off. It is an old war story, one that he never told the same way twice, and they do not need him reminiscing. “Look, whatever’s happening here is tapping into forces far beyond our control.”

She is careful, Tess notices, to make eye contact equally with them all now. Damien does the same thing when he is on the campaign trail.

The vee between Damien’s eyes deepens even further.

_Celine, telling them that she is learning to speak with spirits from an acclaimed medium, oblivious to (or, more likely, ignoring) the concern on her twin’s face because she has never been able to tell when she has gone too far--_

“Murder,” Chef peeps after a long silence, because he would be the sort to taunt God.

“Enough!” Celine shouts, only barely louder than the thunder that shakes the building, and slams her hands down onto the table--

They are all seated at the dining table now, and for that, Tess is thankful, because she is certain she would have fallen with or without Abe’s support. The world spins so badly that she clasps a hand over her mouth and leans to the side to gag.

Damien, beside of her, has one hand on her knee and one on her back immediately. “Tess?”

She swallows the bile and looks back up.

_Do they really not know?_

All she can muster is a nod. Damien is slow to withdraw. William, on her other side, can see the way she curls and uncurls her right hand beneath her chair, digging her nails into her palm for some desperate sense of reality.

“I understand. Mark’s death is a terrible thing indeed,” Celine says. “But I fear that there are forces much darker than anything we’ve seen here today.”

Damien says nothing, but the way his body tenses is as audible to Tess as if he’d shouted.

“ _I’m_ well-versed in the arcane arts, but if you,” Celine indicates them all with an elegant wave of her hand, “can summon lightning with a mere word, we’re all in far graver danger than anything we could hope to face alone. We’re going to have to work together if we’re going to survive this.”

She is so earnest and calm.

_Celine had graced Tess with her beautiful smile, the one that made her fifteen year old heart skip a beat, and warmly taken her hand, and Tess had nearly touched the planchette when Mrs. Barnum burst in, because Celine would not lead her astray._

“Celine, w-what are you proposing?” Damien’s voice is strained. Only Tess can see the way he twists his cane in his lap.

“We need to speak with Mark.” Celine says it as if it is the simplest thing in the world. Perhaps, for her, it is.

“That...doesn’t sound like a good idea.” Abe frowns.

Celine rolls her eyes. “Then it’s a good thing that I don’t need your permission.”

Tess tenses and the skin on the back of her neck tingles. There can be no one behind her--everyone in the manor is at this table, and yet she feels eyes on them all.

But, more importantly, Celine’s entire focus is on Tess now. “You’ve been awfully quiet through this whole thing.”

“Tess found the body this morning.” Damien’s voice is nearly defensive.

It does not help. There is a slight shift in Celine’s face; a narrowing of the eyes, a drawing-in of the mouth, a dimming of the light behind her irises. It is not a change that Tess can articulate but it is one she is entirely too familiar with. It was her warning, when she saw it in Julian, that she was nearing the end of his “patience” and that a blow was soon to come. She called it “the monster” that lurked behind his eyes and beneath his skin, always waiting for a chance to come to the surface in a flurry of violence and rage.

It is already a change that causes Tess’s heart to race and her body to scream at her to run, but to see it on the face of the woman that is the sister she never had?

Chef is the first to turn on her. “With your sticky little fingers.”

_She stole the silver from the kitchen to run away with--_

“And dressed like _that_ ,” Benjamin scoffs.

_She wears the latest fashions thanks to Mrs. Barnum’s patronage but it will never be enough to make her belong when she stands beside Celine at debutante balls--_

“Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted someone so goddamn gorgeous.” Abe shakes his head.

_Wait, what?_

She is breathing too quickly and there are tears building in her eyes and she waits for the last blow to come from William. William, who knows everything about her.

_She has waited two decades for him to realize that it is time to scrape her off of his shoes._

Instead, he looks between her and Celine, confused. “Oh. Uh, pass.”

Damien’s hand is on her knee again beneath the table, warm and tense, fingers nearly curled enough to be grabbing her but only barely restraining himself. He is trying to support her, trying to ground her, but all Tess can do is swallow a sob and shake her leg to shake him off. He lets go and even that hurts because maybe she’d wanted him to see through her.

_He shouldn’t even be dancing with her. She is poor and plain and does not meet his eyes, and she knows his father disapproves of their friendship, and she wishes he would appease his father for once and stop insisting on taking every first dance with her--_

“But I trust you,” Celine says, reaching out to take Tess’s hand between hers’. “You have a far greater part to play in all of this. Will you help me find an answer?”

_Celine’s flawless, neat script at the bottom of one of Damien’s letters, warmth in the bitter cold of a New England winter: ‘I love you’._

Tess nods, because she needs to see Celine smile again, and because they all need answers.

Sure enough, Celine’s mouth quirks up as she stands. “Perfect. Come with me.”

Tess is on her feet to follow her without even thinking. Damien takes her hand suddenly.

And, in an instant, Abe’s voice breaks the spell. “Alright, that’s enough. I’m not just going to sit here while you drag my partner off to her very likely death!”

What had they been going to do? Tess cannot recall anything but the extreme low and extreme high of her mood. Why is Damien holding her hand so tightly, like he’s trying to stop her from moving? Abe is on his feet as well.

The Colonel stands beside of her. “Don’t you dare speak of Celine that way! I trust her with all of my heart, and I see no reason why anyone should doubt her.”

He has overplayed his hand, Tess knows. She sees the anger cross the Detective’s eyes. She was the one who told him that Mark’s wife had left him, and now here is William, unable to hide that he is still in love with Celine.

“If it will make you feel better,” Celine says, her voice placating. “You may stand outside the door and keep watch, but my work is _not_ to be interrupted.”

“Oh, believe you me, I’ll be keeping a close eye on every single one of you.” Abe glances around the table. “Even myself. Especially myself.”

He meets Tess’s eyes in a way that does not wholly fill her with confidence because that just doesn’t make _sense_ , and from his awkward smile, he realizes it.

But Celine is on the move, her heels clicking against the floor as she heads for the stairs. Damien lets go of Tess’s hand to run after his sister.

“Celine, _wait_!” He pleads, catching up with her at the base of the stairs. He shifts to block her path.

Tess lingers where she stood the night before, when Mark had given his speech, and tries to give the siblings even just the illusion of privacy.

“Are you alright?” Damien asks, and Celine only sighs. “I-I know this news can’t be settling well with you--”

Celine pushes him out of her way and takes the stairs two at a time. “I’m fine for now.”

Damien looks back at Tess. She can offer him no advice. They both heard it, the tiniest crack in Celine’s voice, the things that she _doesn’t_ say. Damien follows her up and Tess keeps behind him.

“But all of this talk of the occult, and Mark is _dead_!” It is the first time Damien has said it aloud, Tess realizes. Celine does not turn around until Damien finally catches her arm. “I just...didn’t think you would get mixed up with all of this.”

_I didn’t think you would go this far_ , is what he means.

“There’s more to this world than you could ever hope to imagine. I just had my eyes open to a small portion of it.” Celine’s voice is still softer than before. She has long grown used to defending her interests from Damien.

He sighs again, running his hand through his hair. “Just be careful!”

Celine has already vanished around the corner. Tess moves to pass Damien so that she can follow, but the desperation in his eyes stops her.

“You, too,” he says, softly. “I can’t lose my best girls.”

_She and Celine are Mark’s girls; they are William’s favorite girls; and they are Damien’s best girls._

She reaches out to give his hand a reassuring squeeze. “We’ll be alright, Damien. You’re worrying too much.”

In truth, he is not worrying enough.

The sun has set and the lights have only barely turned on enough for Tess to follow Celine through the deep shadows of the manor. She does not need to be able to see Celine to know where they are going, though; she remembers where Celine’s workspace is. It was only just starting to take shape before Tess had left.

Now, when Celine opens the door, it is draped in dark green cloth and furnished with candles. Tess doesn’t know what all the symbols on the tablecloth mean. She can pick out a few; the sun, the zodiac constellations, something that resembles a calendar. Celine closes the door behind them and when Tess blinks all the candles have been lit.

She sits across from Celine as Celine fidgets with a set of tarot cards, already arranged in a reading. Celine takes her hat off and brushes out her short hair ( _Tess has always envied her for that; if she were to cut her hair so short it would be a scandal_ ) with her fingers.

“I know this must be unsettling for you,” Celine says, so gently and so kindly that Tess forgets her earlier anger. Now that they are alone, some of the pretentiousness ebbs from Celine’s shoulders, and her expression softens. “Mark meant a lot to us all, and you have known him the longest. I couldn’t imagine finding his body. Are you feeling alright?”

_No_ , Tess wants to scream. Instead, she finds herself smiling and shifting to sit straighter in her chair. “I’m alright. My health isn’t the best, and I’m sure once the shock of this all wears off, we’ll both be in a far worse state.”

Celine’s smile is nearly patronizing but Tess does not see it. “I promise, Tess, we won’t do anything too strenuous. And with your help, I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”  
Tess nods. “I know. I just wish there was a better way to figure this all out.”

Celine leans forward conspiratorially. Her eyes are brighter now, in the candlelight, a piercing green with flecks of amber. “You know I’ve never felt very comfortable in this house. Now that my eyes are open, I can see that there are dark forces surrounding it. I believe that Mark’s death is only a footnote in the much larger mystery of this place.”

_Julian’s voice, echoing in her dreams, his and not his all at once, telling her that if she lets him in she will finally be happy--_

Celine rests her hands over Tess’s. “Now, close your eyes, and focus. Think back on all you have seen today. Let yourself fall.”

“Falling” is entirely too accurate a descriptor for the sensation. Tess’s breathing evens out and she begins to let her mind drift. Even Celine’s voice distorts and fades away, until there is nothing but a void.

_“I will not be called a murderer in my own home--” The gleam of sunset off the barrel of William’s gun._

_“Keep your enemies close, eh?” Abe’s voice, distorted, not a sentence she’s ever heard him say._

_The Colonel’s arm through hers’, pulling her from Mark’s bedroom as Abe watches on, a high-pitched ringing in her ears that is too familiar._

_“The body is fucking gone!” The Detective leading her back to the parlor; the Colonel, above, watching her go, listening in._

_Damien’s warm smile in the early morning sunlight, the one that does not reach his eyes because he suspects something is wrong but Tess is too happy in his company to see. He speaks, but all she hears is the ringing and her own heartbeat, speeding up._

_George, digging a hole in the garden, older than she remembers him being. “Employers come and go, some die, some don’t!”_

_There is darkness for a moment, an expanse of stars in the void, Tess floating alone. Then she hears Damien’s voice, deeper, farther, she can reach him--_

_He sits at the desk in the study, chewing on the end of his pen; he is ten years younger and mumbling to himself. “She is sick. Unless the war is over tonight and you come home tomorrow, she won’t be here when you return. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t do more.”_

_“Tess?” Mark, whispering her name. She dives further. “Tess, oh God, thank God--”_

_She lies in her bed, a sheen of sweat on her skin, and takes a shuddering breath; there is something haunted in Mark’s face as he gathers her up into his arms. This is the moment she woke and found her fever had broken. She can feel Mark’s arms around her._

_Then Julian, face a ruined nightmare, icy hands around her throat._ “You _were meant to be mine!”_

_The ringing in her ears is too loud, too piercing, too deafening, she cannot breathe, Julian is too close--_

A flash of lightning brings her back to the room, eyes frantically darting around and her own hands at her throat. Celine is saying something but she still cannot hear over the ringing in her own head, she cannot breathe, she can feel the stutter in her chest of her wheezes and the chill in her lips. She needs help, why is Celine not helping?

The door slams open and Tess begins to hear again. First is Abe’s voice, muffled: “You can hit me later, partner, I gotta get you out of here.”

He sweeps her into his arms to carry her out into the hall. He is calling for the butler. Damien and Celine are shouting at one another in the other room.

_“Look_ at her! What the hell have you done?!”

“We aren’t finished!”

Benjamin is there, with a bottle in his hands. “I found it in her purse.”

It is her medicine, good, they have her medicine.

Benjamin fumbles with the cap. “Mister Mayor, what’s her dose?”

“I think you’ve done quite enough!”

Benjamin looks desperate. “Mayor Damien! How much does she take?”

“It’s enough when I _say_ it’s enough!”

No one is listening. William shakes his head helplessly when Benjamin turns to look at him. He doesn’t know her dose. He hasn’t seen her in ages. Damien is the one that makes sure she always carries the bottle when she goes anywhere.

Abe snatches the bottle from Benjamin’s hands and begins to pour the syrup into the cap. She is at least able to swallow when he puts it against her mouth. He readies a second dose, just in case one is not enough, as they wait the agonizing few minutes it takes for her throat to relax.

He closes the bottle again, still kneeling in front of her. He sees the question in her eyes. “My third partner. Died when she didn’t have her medicine on hand. You’re about the same size as she was.”

“Thank you,” Tess finally manages, her voice hoarse and raw.

“What the hell did she do to you?” Abe asks. His words shake a little, and she gently takes the bottle from his hands, pretending she does not see how jittery they are as well. The realization that he cares for her is nearly crushing.

Tess can only shake her head in response. She is not sure that _Celine_ did anything to her at all.

“I saw George,” she says by way of explanation, looking at Benjamin. “On the grounds. Does he still work here?”

Abe helps pull her to her feet. “Hang on. There’s someone else here? And you didn’t tell me about it?”

Tess shakes her head. “No, George is the gardener, he must be...in his sixties now. He never comes in the house. Not as long as I’ve been alive, anyway.”

_He would send her back with a basket of flowers for Mrs. Barnum to use as a centerpiece; he would send her back with a satchel of basil, chamomile, and sage tied around her neck; he would send her back with a warning to be careful, and she was a child who never listened._

“Same place he’s always been,” Chef replies.

“For all we know, _he_ could be the murderer!” Abe nearly shouts. Tess isn’t sure if it’s his anger or the thunder that makes her flinch away from him.

“For the last time, stop saying that word!” Celine storms down the hallway, Damien trailing behind her. Everyone is angry and Tess is having to stop herself from running.

“George wouldn’t kill anyone, he just keeps to himself! He says the house is--” Tess stops herself. She can’t say that George always acted as if the house were cursed. “He says it’s just for the ‘upstairs’ sort.”

Chef and Benjamin both look at her strangely. The Barnums have never been the sort to treat their staff with any sort of derision. And Chef, at least, knows that George has never said anything like that. For once he does not call her out on her behavior. Lying is alright so long as it’s to protect his friend, then.

Damien shakes his head, clearly frustrated. “All of this arguing is getting nowhere! Just go and talk to George and be done with it!”

_Where is William?_

“Hold on a sec. You’re not coming with us?” Abe asks.

Damien’s frustration cracks for a moment and he looks at Tess. There’s a strange amount of guilt in his eyes. “I need to stay here with Celine.”

“I don’t need _your_ help!” Celine’s voice is venomous.

And, finally, Damien’s patience comes to a screeching end. He shouts. “Our friend is _dead_!”

Tess and Celine both flinch away from him. Tess has never heard Damien yell; he has always been careful around her to keep his voice gentle and kind. She’s known he has a glimmer of Celine’s temper, but he has always kept it in check for her nerves. Now, though, her brain cannot help but register even Damien as a potential threat, and that is a horrible thing to feel.

“I’m-I’m sorry,” He huffs, fighting to regain his composure. “I just need answers for all of this. I cannot lose any more of my friends.”

Celine does not so much soften as she does give up; she is an unstoppable force and Damien is an immovable object, and neither of them will win. “Fine. But I need to stay here.”

“Fine.”

“Alright, then _we’re_ all going outside--where’s the Colonel?” Abe finally notices William’s absence.

Benjamin shrugs. “I believe he returned to his room.”

Abe rolls his eyes. “And if we’re lucky, he’ll stay there. Come on.”

Benjamin, Chef, and Abe all turn to go downstairs. Damien and Celine head back towards Celine’s room. Tess remains in the middle, a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach. Damien looks back at her through the crack in the door as it closes, and he smiles, as if to reassure her that it will be alright, as he so often has.

It is the last time they see one another.

***

It feels like she’s part of a mob as the four of them head down the patio stairs to find George. Chef, in front, carries a lantern. The path is well lit in some places by electric lights, but others are still concerningly dark. She wonders why Mark never fixed that.

She knows it doesn’t matter.

“Hey, hands where I can see them!” Abe demands as George comes into view. He is precisely where Tess saw him, digging a hole. Abe’s drawn gun seems like an overreaction.

George, on the other hand, doesn’t react to it at all. “What, would you like to dig the hole for yourself?”

It is a strange relief to Tess to find that the groundskeeper is as grumpy as he’s always been. He was nice to her, in his way, when she was young and helped him in the garden. She’d wanted so badly to help him that she’d remained annoyingly underfoot until he’d finally softened.

He seems surprised to see her when he finally looks up. Tess feels strangely naked without one of the herb satchels tied around her throat, and then realizes that she is in fact standing there in her underwear. She hurriedly pulls the dressing gown closed and ties it. It is flimsy and hardly any better, but it at least has sleeves and the semblance of a skirt.

“How do you not know about the murder inside?!” Abe demands. Lightning cracks over head, but no rain accompanies it.

The light is even more purple outside beneath the clouds. It strikes Tess suddenly as if something has given up pretending to be a storm, though she doesn’t know where that idea came from.

“Mark is dead,” she says, and it feels an awful lot like that’s all she’s been able to say lately, as if she is some eternal bearer of bad news.

_She begs Mark to let her be the one to write William to let him know of his parents’ deaths, because if he is going to hate one of them, it is better for it to be her--the cousins will need each other more than William will need her._

“And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t suspect you of being involved with his death! What’s this hole for?” Abe still hasn’t put down his gun.

George actually laughs. “Employers come and go. Some die, some don’t. Some are murdered, some aren’t. S’none of my business. I’m just here to fix a burst water pipe, if that’s alright with your gracefulness!”

Abe looks at her, and Tess nods. “He wasn’t part of this.”

“Finally, some sense,” George scoffs.

“So then you’ll have no problem coming inside and having a nice, long chat with the rest of us,” Abe says, “before I lose my mind and start dabbling in murder myself.”

_Why is there no thunder when George says the word?_

George straightens himself up and Tess is suddenly reminded of how tall he is; taller, even, than Abe.

“Now you listen here, sonny,” He points at the Detective. “I haven’t been in that house since before this girl was born. And I’m not about to break that winning streak now. There’s only one thing, one manifestation, that would get me inside of that madhouse.”

The back of Tess’s neck begins to tingle. The hair on her arms rises. It is the same strange sense of electricity she felt when the Colonel appeared from nowhere in the parlor.

_Something is wrong something is wrong something is wrong--_

George’s icy blue eyes settle solely on Tess in a way that makes her skin crawl. “And you had better pray to God that that reason never comes to pass.”

There is no time to pray. Tess is already turned back towards the house and moving when the sky explodes. The house lights up from within, white and blue glows, and all she can think of is Celine and Damien and William still inside, she has to get to them.

She knows that the others are running behind her. She knows she is screaming her friends’ names. She cannot lose them. Not like this, not so quickly, not in one moment. She does not think that there is a God that has ever listened to her when she begs, but just this once, please, do not let it all be over in one day, not twenty years of happiness--

The manor does not make sense and Tess does not _care_. She has done this before, she remembers now, appearing and disappearing at will through rooms that are tinted an unnatural shade of blue. There are no herbs around her throat to protect her now.

_There is nothing that can protect her now._

She nearly crashes into the Colonel as she keeps running for Celine’s room. She has to get the twins. The light is worse around the door, purple and blue and white and red, glowing too brightly, something is _wrong_.

Celine throws the door open before Tess can even lay a hand on it, and Tess is rooted to the spot by Celine’s eyes. They are dark as pitch. She is smiling, but it is not right. Tess can feel herself being drawn in, pulled into the Seer, unable to look away, unable to think--

Then the door slams shut between them, and Tess collapses to the floor like a puppet with cut strings.


	5. I Woke Just The Same

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Last night I dreamt/I’d forgotten my name/’Cause I’d sold my soul/But I woke just the same” I Wish I Was the Moon, Neko Case

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my rewatch of ep 4 and the BTS I’ve discovered that I completely imagined the headline that said the mayor was in legal trouble but I’ve built up the “Tess has a blind spot for Damien because he’s better at hiding his shit than everyone else and it’s this blind trust that damns her in the end” plot point for too long to throw it out now, so uh, yolo

The click of the lock turning is entirely too final. Tess cannot bring herself to move. She has the option, she has control of her body again, but she is afraid that if she lets herself move she will rip the key from George’s hand and reopen the door to try and get to Damien.

She couldn’t see him behind Celine. The light was too bright. Celine was too beautiful. Is he alright? Are his eyes as horribly dark as his sister’s? Doesn’t Celine need help?

“Wh-where’s Celine? What’s going on?” The Colonel asks from somewhere behind her. Tess cannot look at him.

She will throw herself into his arms if she looks, she will cry if she looks, she will lose her composure if she looks.

“She’s gone, same as everyone else.” George sighs. He passes by Tess and gives her a gentle pat on the shoulder. “This place is cursed. I’m leaving, and if you all had half a brain, you’d do the same.”

And then he is gone as well, nothing but the sound of footsteps on the stairs. So much of her life gone, just like that, in one bright flash.

She still has William.

“Don’t walk away from me!” William shouts. “Where’s Celine?! Where’s Damien?!”

He grabs her, suddenly, violently, pulling her up to her feet and forcing her to turn and face him. The Detective is between them in a heartbeat, pushing him away from Tess, and she holds her hand over her mouth and pinches her nose to stop herself from sobbing.

“I’ve spent twenty-five years cooking for these uppity fucks, I’m not about to die for them!” Chef throws down his ladle. That is the end of that, then, the end of everything the Barnums built.

He is gone, too. William’s hands curl into fists at his side. Tess steps more and more behind Abe.

_Damien and Mark, holding William back when she showed them the bruises Julian left on her, because William swore he would beat him to death to show him how it feels._

“I know things seem like they are beyond our control. I’m going to take my leave, and I implore of you to do the same,” Benjamin says. He puts his hand on William’s shoulder.

William shakes him off. His voice is a snarl behind gritted teeth. “I will not let my friends die in this godforsaken house!”

He rounds on Tess and Abe. “And if you all are too coward to do the same, then you’d best leave before I kill you myself!”

_Julian, hands around her throat, if you won’t marry me then you won’t marry anyone at all, you are mine._

She pinches tighter and she cannot breathe for the lump in her throat. This is not how things were meant to end. She was never supposed to be afraid of William.

She was never supposed to lose William. Not to war, not to death, not to his own mind.

Abe follows William, yelling. “Hang on, I’m not done with you!”

And that leaves Tess and Benjamin alone. Tess drops her hand away from her face and finally begins to cry.

“Miss Tess,” Benjamin’s voice is soft and comforting and Tess does not know how they reached the point where he is the only one she trusts to see her like this. He rests a hand gently on her back and that is the final straw because she buries her face in his shoulder, heedless of her tears and snot ruining his fine vest, and he hesitantly wraps his arms around her in a semblance of a hug.

_William’s bear hugs, always an assurance she is loved, from the time he follows her into the woods when they are fourteen to seeing her on the doorstep of the manor only yesterday._

“I’m sorry,” she manages to babble out. She’s not sure if she’s apologizing to Benjamin or everyone that cannot hear her anymore.

_I’m sorry I couldn’t do more, she writes, her tears ruining the ink, because Mr. and Mrs. Barnum are dead and she doesn’t know what else to say to William._

“Miss Tess,” Benjamin repeats, gently taking her shoulders so he can step back and look down at her. “I know you and the Colonel are in pain. But we _must_ leave this place. There’s only death here now. Master would never forgive me if I let anything happen to you.”

He is right, of course. They need to get the police. More police. Something is horribly wrong. They need to report the deaths. She is a district attorney. She knows these things.

“Al-alright. Let me get my keys from my room. I’ll meet you at my car.” Tess wipes her eyes.

Benjamin nods and heads off. Tess takes another moment to try and compose herself. She spares one last look back at the door to Celine’s room, and--

“Hey!” Celine’s voice is a hushed whisper. Tess’s heart leaps into her throat.

“Celine?” She asks the air, taking a few tentative steps towards the door.

“Help!” She has never heard Celine scared until this moment, she has to find her--

The world is wrong again when she turns to follow Celine’s voice. It is a sickly shade of blue-green, drenched in shadows. The lights are dim. Voices echo all around her, indistinct. But, through it all, Celine’s voice.

_This way._

Tess follows. The house warps around her as she moves. There is no one around.

_Damien’s voice, telling her to be careful. Mark, saying that the party is not all about him. William and Abe, yelling about madness._

She stands in the living room.

_Mrs. Barnum, sobbing that this is not the legacy she wants to leave her children._

The kitchen.

_Chef, yelling at her to stay out for the thousandth time._

The sitting room, and then the study.  
_You first, in a voice so distorted she no longer knows whose it is._

And then the color comes back to the world, as if nothing ever happened, and Tess leans over to vomit into the potted plant beside of her.

She’s never seen the study organized, by any sense of the word. Not when it was Mr. Barnum’s, not when it was William’s, and certainly not when it was Mark’s. She is used to there being script pages and unfinished letters strewn about. This, however, is something entirely different.

It is newspapers that decorate the desk, photographs that are pinned to the corkboard, sticky notes across every available space.

This is clearly where the Detective has made his base, and it sends a chill down Tess’s spine. How long has he been watching them all to have amassed this much information?

There are pictures of William and Celine together. Of course he didn’t seem surprised, then, when Tess told him that Mark’s wife had left him. He’d known all along. He’d been surprised that she’d been honest with him. That she’d tried to comfort him.

“Safari Hunt Gone Wrong” is stamped across pictures of the Colonel on various magazines. She remembers the headline. She never asked for the story. She never wanted to know. It was easier not to know.

It is no longer easier to pretend she does not know the truth.

There are even photographs of herself, headlines about her being the city’s first female district attorney. A sticky note is attached to a photo of her and Damien, his arm around her waist, his cane in his other hand. It’s a recent picture. She _remembers_ this walk through the park.

“Does she know?” Reads the note.

Tess doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know.  
There are headlines about Mark’s withdrawal from public life, gossip rags speculating wildly about whether or not he was dead. Damien would always scoff and shake his head when they’d walk past a newsstand selling one of the tabloids.

And Damien. Oh, Damien. There are even candid photos of him pinned to the wall, and a note listing all of his visits to the manor, and they are far more recent than he ever told her. Tess is reminded of the photo in Mark’s bedroom.

“Mayor in Legal Trouble” reads one of the papers as she shifts through the clutter on the desk, and she thinks it would have been kinder for Damien to have stabbed her through the chest. The betrayal feels the same. He lied to her. How did he keep a legal battle hidden from her? How _could_ he have?

_What else has he hidden from her?_

Tess remembers abruptly that she meant to get her keys and meet Benjamin to leave. It doesn’t matter anymore, she thinks. She’ll simply meet him by the car and hotwire it. It would hardly be the first time she’s done it. She doesn’t even know if she’s going to get the police. It would be easier to drive until she runs out of gas or the car stops. Drive until she hits the thick forests of Washington and the Canadian border.

_Run, until there is nowhere left for her to run._

“There you are!” The Colonel’s growl makes her jump and whip around to face him. Tess fumbles on the desk, instinctively reaching for something she can use as a weapon as he advances. “I’ve been meaning to ask you some questions--”

A letter opener, there must be a letter opener, or if she can get her hand around one of the encyclopedias…

Her movement draws his eyes to the mess around them. He picks up a few of the newspapers and throws them aside, growing more and more frantic as he reads.

“The Detective’s been keeping tabs on us?!” He snarls, as if she would have an answer.

Tess can’t find any words. She is still trying to keep distance between them, still trying to grab the edge of an encyclopedia. One good blow to the ear will give her time to run from him if he attacks her.

_He killed Mark, after all._

“He’s been keeping tabs on me, and Celine…” The Colonel throws away a piece of paper. Tess can only see Celine’s name written on it in large lettering. “He’s the one who orchestrated all of this!”

She has the encyclopedia in hand now, and the Colonel is getting too close, but she won’t strike until she’s sure.

“ _He_ did this.” The Colonel is seething now. He turns away from her, draws his gun. “Detective!”

_When did she become so afraid of William?_

Of course, he isn’t William anymore. Not truly. None of them are the same people they used to be.

He storms out of the study with clear, murderous intent. This is a crime of passion. It is not premeditated. He would get a lesser sentence. He has already killed one person.

William is gone. _Her_ William is gone. Tess is chasing after this man she does not know anymore because she loves the man he used to be. He was taken from her by the war, by grief, by his own mistakes. He could not be happy with what he had. He always did what he wanted and damned the consequences.

Gone, as he stomps up the staircase, is the boy that befriended the poorest girl in his class out of nothing more than a quickly-professed love of her smile. Gone, as he throws open doors and shouts for the Detective, is the teenager that chased her into the woods to reassure her that she was truly loved. Gone, as he shoves her out of his way hard enough to slam her into the wall, is the man that once burst into her room with a gun because he thought someone meant her harm.

She has lost everything. All she can do now is stop him from making another mistake. If she is good enough, then she will be able to keep this shell of her friend in her life.

_She cannot even do that._

The Detective is trying to pick the lock to Celine’s room when the Colonel finally finds him, Tess still only a few steps behind.

“You’d better choose your next words carefully, Colonel,” The Detective threatens, drawing his gun as well.

There is no Damien this time to help her try and talk them down, no Celine to burst in at the last moment. There is no one left but Tess.

“Only my friends can call me that, and you are no friend of mine!” The Colonel snaps back.

Could she grab the gun from him before he could fire?

“Oh, you’re one to talk about friends, you murderer!” Lightning punctuates the Detective’s words.

She knew all along, from the moment she found Mark’s body, that the Colonel had done it. There was never any other choice.

“I didn’t kill anybody!” The Colonel looks briefly over his shoulder, as if he is trying to convince her. “This is madness!”

If she jumped between them, would he shoot her to get to the Detective?

“Madness is stealing your best friend’s wife! Madness is squeezing him for cash to fund your own exploits with her!” The Detective is going too far.

“Both of you, stop!” Tess shouts, finally finding her voice, but it does not matter. Neither of them hear her.

She reaches forward to grab the Colonel’s shoulder. He shakes her off and she hits the railing hard enough to rattle her bones.

“Shut up,” He snarls, and she knows he is not speaking to her.

_It doesn’t matter if she is here or not, really._

“Madness is plotting the death of your childhood friend because you can’t handle the--”

The report of the gun deafens Tess for a moment. She does not hear herself scream as the Detective seizes up and slumps to the ground, blood blossoming from his chest. She does not think when she reaches for the Colonel’s gun, trying to pry it from his hands, because God, she could not stop even this, what does it matter anymore?

The gun is between them and she should know better than to do this, she has seen so many cases on her desk where such a thing causes--

Being shot feels strange. It is a moment of stillness where the Colonel shoves her backwards and lets the gun fall, where she looks down at the blood on her hands, where she hears nothing and feels nothing. Then it is a white hot pain. Then it is Tess losing her balance and tipping over the railing, plummeting to the foyer below.

For a moment, it is William whose mouth falls open in horror, who tries in vain to catch her, as if he really thinks he could save her now. Tess remembers that last moment of clarity in his face. She remembers the last time she sees William.

_She is almost glad that she is not the one to survive._

***

The void is as cold as it has always been. There are no stars this time. There is nothing, for an agonizing amount of time, and Tess is afraid that this is all there is. Consciousness in nothingness.

Then, when she blinks, Mark’s body is in front of her. Bloody cuts cover his torso. His lips and the skin beneath his nails are blue. There is the imprint of a rope around his neck. Bruises blossom along his face and collarbone. A hole in the center of his forehead oozes a mix of blood and brain matter that should turn her stomach.

She feels nothing.

“It’s not fair, is it?” He says, his voice distorted so badly she nearly doesn’t recognize it.

It isn’t fair. It has never been fair. She has paid the price for her friends’ transgressions far too often.

Then the body is gone, and she is alone again.

She would sit, if she still had a body, if she was not simply drifting. This existence might not be so bad after all. Lonely, dark, empty, but it is peaceful.

Celine and Damien glow when they step from the darkness, and all of a sudden, Tess is solid again. She wants to hug her friends (if they are all trapped in this Hell together, then perhaps it is not a Hell at all), but she cannot seem to move.

“He took everything from us,” Damien says, with no context or greeting. He gestures at the ground, where Tess can only barely make out the ruined shape of Mark’s body. “He trapped us in here with this broken shell and no way out.”

“It’s true. This whole time, I thought it was the house, but…” Celine’s voice drips with remorse. “I never thought he’d fall this far.”

“And we played right into his hands!” Damien responds. Tess knows that they are talking to her, but she can’t help but feel like a bystander as the twins communicate. “He’s been planning this for years, and now that son-of-a-bitch is out there walking around in _my_ body--”

“Damien, we can’t do this now!” Celine reaches out to shush her brother. It is strange to see Celine as the calm one. Celine turns back to Tess. “I’m sorry that I don’t have answers for you right now. Just please, know that Mark took everything from us in his...twisted quest for vengeance.”

Vengeance? Tess isn’t even sure what part of this was vengeance. Had Mark meant to kill William? Had he meant to kill them all? Had he truly hated her so much in the end?

“Death does not mean the same thing here.” Celine seems closer, suddenly. They both do.

Damien tucks his hands into his pockets. He does not have his cane to fidget with, Tess realizes.

“What Celine means,” he says, “is this doesn’t have to be the end. You’re trapped in here just the same as us, but your body, broken as it may be, is still out there.”

What is so wrong with being trapped here together? That’s all Tess has ever wanted. For them all to be back together again. They are missing William, but he has just murdered her. He will join them soon enough.

“Mark’s not the only one that can use this place to his benefit.” Celine smiles, and Tess feels at peace. She has always trusted that smile. “I can send you back.”

“But you can’t survive on your own.” Damien is right, of course. Tess has never been able to survive on her own.

There is an echo behind their voices that is not entirely theirs’. She remembers Julian, for a moment, in a nightmare of a void like this, and the way his words had echoed in her head until his voice was not his own.

But that was a nightmare. That was Julian. This is Celine and Damien. She loves them. She trusts them.

“You can’t blame William. He’s a good man,” Celine pleads, and Tess nods in agreement. Of course this isn’t William’s fault. “But...he’s dangerous now.”

“I know this all sounds crazy,” Damien reaches out for her. She can feel his hand on her wrist even though he doesn’t touch her. “Honestly, I don’t know what the fuck is going on. But I know that I trust Celine. And if you trust us…”

Of course she trusts them. They are her best friends. They are offering her a chance to make this right. Another chance to see William. To have her family back together again. That is all she’s ever wanted.

“Just...let me in.” Damien flickers. How odd. “We can fix this. Together.”

Julian asked for the same thing in her nightmare, so long ago.

“You have a choice here,” Celine insists, and it is so very strange to see her exchanging roles with Damien. “But just know that this is the only way you can escape.”

Tess nods, slowly, because she feels as if her voice is made of molasses.

Celine sighs in relief and closes her eyes. They start to fade away. The last thing she hears is Damien’s voice: “This will work. I promise.”

They have promised each other so many things over the years.

None of them have been kept.

***

Tess wakes on her back in the foyer floor, with a comforting weight over her chest and the echo of Damien and Celine in her head. Standing takes a considerable amount of effort. Her body feels wrong, as if all of her limbs fell asleep at once. The Colonel’s coat falls off of her as she stands. Ah. He wrapped her in it.

William has always cocooned her in his coats when things go wrong. She wants to smile, but can’t.

When she finally manages to turn around, William is staring at her from the bench. He is cradling Damien’s cane. The echo of gunfire rings in her head and she stumbles away from him. He is going to hurt her. Her stomach still aches.

“No, no, it’s okay!” He reaches out for her. He looks so happy. “I thought you were dead. I-I mean, of course you’re not dead! How could you be!”

She wants to tell him that she _was_ dead. She cannot make her mouth move. She can do nothing but look at him and stumble. She is reminded of the time they saw a fawn in the backyard, learning to walk, with the way her knees keep threatening to buckle under her.

“I wouldn’t have killed you--I didn’t kill you!” He moves towards the mirror and she follows, keeping the table between them. “I didn’t kill anyone! It was all a joke!”

He begins to laugh, and Tess manages to take a few steps towards him. If she can grab Damien’s cane, she can support herself. She wants to scream at him that it was not a joke. He did kill her. He did kill Mark. They were dead. Abe is still dead.

_Abe is dead._

Her ears begin to ring. She cannot speak.

“Oh, I bet Damien put you up to this, that rapscallion!” The Colonel is laughing too loudly now. He turns away from her and heads towards the kitchen, calling out for Celine and Damien.

Tess wants to follow him. She cannot move.

She turns instead towards the mirror and Damien’s cane. She reaches out for the cane. She picks it up.

Being severed from her body does not hurt the same way as being shot, but Tess is still acutely aware of the moment it happens. The reflection in the mirror is not hers at all; it is Damien’s, or near enough.

The world around her slowly fades from the vibrant morning light back to the sickly blueish green of the In-Between. The mirror shatters.

“Damien?” Tess whispers. The body that was once hers’ turns to look at her and smirks. “Damien, what are you doing?”

He glimmers here, in this world between worlds, warping the light. It is as if he is a piece of the void given form. But that doesn’t make sense.

He begins to walk away from her. She can move now, but it isn’t enough. Her fingers phase through him when she tries to grab him, burning with cold.

“No, no, don’t leave me here, Damien, _please_ , Damien--you promised!” She screams. She finds purchase on his wrist, digs her nails in, refuses to let go.

He turns to her with a sneer that is not Damien’s at all and rips his hand from her grip. The pressure around her rises, like she is sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Her ears pop, and he is gone, and she is left alone to pay the price for her friends’ pride one final time.

That’s the terrible thing about uneven numbers. In a quintet, someone is always left out when the lines are drawn. And three _is_ a crowd, after all.

It _just_ isn’t fair, is it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tess is not a perfectly objective character, and when she sees the newspapers about Damien, she assumes the worst. He was absolutely not telling her the whole truth + doing some shady shit, but he wasn’t intending it maliciously. That’s just how she interpreted it and it’s not like he can clear things up now ;)


	6. In This Valley of Dying Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The eyes are not here/There are no eyes here/In this valley of dying stars” The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like the last fairy godmother at the party trying to break a curse, I tried to make the ending slightly less horrifically sad. I may have just made it worse. I straight up made myself cry while writing this, but it was also like 1 am, so I was already Emotionally Vulnerable.  
>  **Warnings** : unreality, just horrible sadness

Tess is not sure how long she remains collapsed in the distorted version of the foyer, staring at her broken reflection. It is still her face, in the In-Between, not Damien’s. Damien, who stole her body. She’d trusted him.

She cannot even be angry with him. She cannot even be angry at all. There is nothing but sorrow and bitter betrayal and knowing that she should have known better. There is nothing but the silence of the empty manor.

“Hey! Is someone else here?! What the shit is happening?!” Silence, until Abe’s voice breaks it.

Tess is on her feet in a moment. If Abe is here, then--

She bends the manor to get to him faster. It takes a few rooms before she makes it to the top of the stairs.

“Abe?” She whispers. Sure enough, he stands not far from his body.

He spins around to face her. “Whoa, shit! Tess?”

Tess can’t help but laugh. Abe is familiar and vulgar and real and here and she is not alone anymore.

_But his body is right there, halfway between this world and the next, and she knows what she must do._

“It’s me!” She says, forcing herself to sound cheerful.

“Where are we? Are we dead? Because I’m going to haunt the shit out of the Colonel if I’m dead, believe you me.” He still talks too fast.

She wants to hug him. She can’t let herself do that. “I think...this is sort of an inbetween? I don’t know. Between the real world and something else. But we’re not dead.”

His brows furrow. “The Colonel shot me in the chest.”

“You got lucky,” She shrugs, backing him towards his body. “Death doesn’t work the same way here. You can come back from this.”

Tess can still hear Celine’s voice echoing in her head.

“What about you?” He frowns.

She doesn’t know if she can cry as a ghost, and she doesn’t want to find out. “Don’t worry about me. I just wanted to make sure you knew what was going on. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

He nods, and it hurts how easy it is to convince him that she is still alive. For a moment, as he faces his body and comes to terms with what’s about to happen, Tess thinks she’s gotten away with it.

Then he turns back to her, horror in his bright eyes. “Hang on a second. He shot you! I saw you go over the railing, where’s your--”

“Goodbye, Abe,” She manages, and gives him a shove back into his body and back to the land of the living.

She feels a piece of herself tear away to go with him, and she takes comfort in that. He lingers between worlds for a moment longer. His body jolts awake, and he reaches out for her with wild eyes. He fades back into the real world, where she cannot see him.

“Tess!” His scream still echoes to her.

Finally, Tess is truly alone. She curls up in the spot where Abe’s body was, pulls her knees to her chest, and begins to sob.

***

It is impossible to tell time in the In-Between, as Tess takes to calling her new home. The clocks do not work. The light does not change. Nothing changes. She tries to break things, at first, to smash vases and mirrors--especially mirrors. She can no longer stand to see her reflection. It’s a mockery of the life she should’ve had.

It would be more maddening, she thinks, if she could not dream. She spends most of her time asleep, learning to control her dream world. She always dreams of the same thing: a debutante ball, where she can dance forever without feeling tired or winded.

At first, none of the guests have faces.

They have dresses and hair and bodies, but there is only a blank expanse of skin where their faces should be. Try as she might, she cannot change that.

***

“Miss Tess?” Benjamin’s voice wakes her. It booms and echoes as all things do when they filter through the worlds. He is real, and she is not.

Still, she drags herself out of bed anyway, because another human’s voice is beautiful. She’s nearly forgotten what her own sounds like.

“Miss Tess, I...I’m sorry for everything that happened.” He is in the foyer. His voice is louder there. He is hesitant. “I...don’t know if I believe that you’re still here, but that detective seemed convinced.”

Something appears before her, on the table below the broken mirror. Flowers. They are beautiful, she knows instinctively, even if they look half-wilted through the filter of the worlds. Then a set of pictures: Celine, Mark, and herself. Altars. Memorials, to the ones who lived in the manor. Rose petals and hawthorn berries spill onto the table in front of her picture. A gift from George.

“No one can find the mayor,” Benjamin continues. “No one can find any bodies, in fact. And, erm…”

He is silent for so long that Tess fears it has been months.

“This is ridiculous. If-if you truly are here, can you...give me some sort of sign?” He finally asks.

She bends the manor around him and then they are in her bedroom. She hears him gasp.

“I-I’m so sorry.”

She hears the front door slam, and she knows he is gone.

She goes back to sleep.

***

She dreams up masks for all of the guests at her party, elaborate ones, like the Venetian masks the Barnums brought home from Carnival one spring. She creates one for herself, too, because even in her dreams, she cannot stand to see her own face.

But it isn’t a ball without a beautiful view of the stars outside of the windows, so she refuses to remove the reflections.

It is easier, anyway, to fall into the fantasy like this.

***

Benjamin comes back again, and Tess can tell that it is sooner rather than later. He calls her at the foyer again, replaces the flowers, replaces the offering at her memorial. She transports him to her room as a sign that she is still there. She hears the bed creak beneath his weight and she sits on it as well, trying to be beside of him.

“Master Mark left the manor to me in his will, so it seems we’ll be spending quite a while together,” He says, on the verge of laughing. It is truly a ridiculous situation, Tess will give him that. “If there’s anything you’d like me to do to make this...easier, I suppose, for you, let me know.”

Music. She wants to hear music. How to tell him?

She folds the world so that they stand in front of the piano.

“The...piano? I’m afraid I can’t play...would a record be alright?” Benjamin asks.

She moves him, slightly, to look at the gramophone.

She hears him gag.

“I’m sorry. This is quite disorienting.”

He has no idea.

***

He buys a wide selection of music for her. She has no way to indicate which one she likes best, and he lets them play all day and most of the night. Tess follows him around the house for as long as she can hear him going through his daily chores. He speaks idly to her.

He doesn’t like to not be working. He likes everything to be perfectly neat. He feels wrong living in this house now.

He cries, sometimes, at night when she suspects he thinks she isn’t listening.

No one can find the Mayor. They’ve declared Damien and Celine legally dead, even in the absence of bodies. William refuses to believe that anyone ever died. Benjamin hasn’t seen him in months. Abe stuck around long enough to rave about Tess being trapped in the manor before leaving to try and track down William.

He tells her the news, reads her the papers, even the mundane articles about cats being rescued from trees. The words rearrange themselves into gibberish (they are not gibberish, they are mirrored, and she knows this, but she refuses to bring a shard of the mirror with her so that she can read) whenever he puts a paper down and it appears in her world, but the pictures remain largely the same, and it is wonderful to see the way her city changes.

She dreams less and less.

***

“I had a job interview today,” Benjamin says as he puts away the dishes. “It didn’t go well. Everyone seems to think that I had something to do with the...incident.”

Tess sits on the island counter in the middle of the room. Chef would never have let her get away with this.

“I’m happy enough keeping this place for you, of course!” He sounds almost nervous. “I want to make sure you're alright."

It is as if he’s punched her in the gut.

_For you. I want to make sure you're alright._

She has spent too much time with him. He has forgotten that she isn’t real anymore. He has put too much faith in her. It will crush him. Or, worse, it will turn her into a monster.

She is glad that he cannot hear her crying.

***

He still calls her at the door when he comes in. She answers less and less frequently. It hurts. He sounds confused. _He_ sounds hurt. Slowly, surely, she phases herself out of Benjamin’s life again. The offerings at her memorial are left to deteriorate.

So long as she is in his life, neither of them will be free.

“I’ve got a new job,” He says. He is uncertain again, believing he is speaking to the air. “You’ve moved on, so I-I think it’s time I do, too. If you’re still here, Miss Tess…”

She stands in the foyer with him, but she does not respond. He lets the silence drag on, but she knows he hasn’t left yet. He is waiting for one last sign, waiting for her to teleport him across the manor, waiting to know that he is not the only one left.

“Goodbye.”

He locks the front door behind him, and she is well and truly trapped. He believes she has moved on. That she is in a better place. That there is hope.

Tess cannot take that from him.

She cries herself to sleep.

***

The manor deteriorates around her. She does not wake. She forgets the names of the people she loved. They are things now, all of them: the Seer, the Colonel, the Mayor, the Detective, the Actor, the Butler, the Chef, the Gardener, the District Attorney.

The longer she is asleep, the more elaborate the party becomes. She forgets the sound of her voice. She forgets her name. She creates facsimiles of three young men, nearly a foot taller than she is. Their masks set them apart from one another. She makes a young woman with short hair, dressed in an elegant black gown, feathers pinned into her hair. They cannot speak, but they are wonderful dancers, and it has always been easier to pretend.

Tess sleeps, and she dreams of a world where things did not go so horribly wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! I'm quite possibly the only person who actually enjoyed this, lmao, but I had a lot of fun writing it and I don't usually do anything this self-indulgent/self-insertish. I may or may not continue to post the little one-shots I have written on my tumblr, so if you liked any of this, feel free to follow me there: rose-writes-things.tumblr.com


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